Wednesday, March 24, 2010

What is the point in financial reform, when there is NONE?

As long as the Democrats, Republicans remain beholded to Wall Street and the "too big to fail banks", there will never be any financial reform. And when the banks and Wall Street fuck up again, they will be running to Washington, D.C. again to bail them out. And guess what? They will continue to do so.

This reform by Chris Dodd and Barney Frank is a joke.

For all the proposals stuffed into its 1,336 pages, the financial reform bill that's headed to the full Senate soon will change very little for the banks that brought us the most dire financial system crisis since the Great Depression, critics say.

When proposed a year ago by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010 held enormous promise. The bill was supposed to unify a patchwork of rules and agencies, regulate a “shadow” banking system that hid the riskiest bets, protect taxpayers from picking up the tab for another bank bailout and create a new agency to protect consumers from predatory lending.

On Tuesday, Dodd repeated his commitment to get full Senate approval of tough new measures to address those issues.

"What I'm determined to do is get a strong bill," he told reporters at a news conference with Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

But Dodd faces an uphill battle. After a year of debate, the bill that emerged from the Banking Committee Monday was riddled with loopholes, compromises and watered-down provisions that undermined the proposals’ principal goals, critics say.

"It doesn't do any significant reform of the system that got us into this problem," said William Isaac, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. during the Reagan administration. "All it does is shuffle the same powers around among the same agencies in a little different way. It really hasn't changed anything."



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