Treasury?s Plan Would Give Fed Wide New Power

[NoStateofMind]

Treasury?s Plan Would Give Fed Wide New Power

WASHINGTON ? The Treasury Department will propose on Monday that Congress give the Federal Reserve broad new authority to oversee financial market stability, in effect allowing it to send SWAT teams into any corner of the industry or any institution that might pose a risk to the overall system.

The proposal is part of a sweeping blueprint to overhaul the nation?s hodgepodge of financial regulatory agencies, which many experts say failed to recognize rampant excesses in mortgage lending until after they set off what is now the worst financial calamity in decades.

:shocked:

Wow! Are you kidding me? Keeping the markets safe by "force"? What kind of government do we have again? Someone please remind me, I seem to have forgotten.


EDIT: The "SWAT teams" is hyperbole. What they meant basically is accountants. They go on to say the "new FED powers" is basically summed up here:

The Treasury plan would let Fed officials examine the practices and even the internal bookkeeping of brokerage firms, hedge funds, commodity-trading exchanges and any other institution that might pose a risk to the overall financial system.

Still boils down to more FED meddling in markets. One could argue that the FED having "oversight" so to speak would be good to prevent such a catastrophe from happening again. You make the call.

 

[MadRat]

Why not give the FBI the authority they already have? Oh yeah, the President rules the FBI...

 

[Rainsford]

I think "the markets" have proven over and over again that, left completely alone, incredibly bad things tend to happen. I don't think we need to resort to communism or anything, but surely a happy middle ground with SOME oversight wouldn't be a bad idea.

 

[Mxylplyx]

Originally posted by: Rainsford
I think "the markets" have proven over and over again that, left completely alone, incredibly bad things tend to happen. I don't think we need to resort to communism or anything, but surely a happy middle ground with SOME oversight wouldn't be a bad idea.

I agree. It's rediculous that every sane person saw the coming crisis in the subprime market for years, yet nobody attempted to do anything about it. Too many people were benefiting from it at the time. House flippers, brokers, realestate speculators, were all making a killing. The president could brag about the highest home ownership, so he wasnt about to do anything. The media was even reporting on it. It was akin to standing on the tracks watching the train coming from a mile away

 

[smack Down]

Originally posted by: Rainsford
I think "the markets" have proven over and over again that, left completely alone, incredibly bad things tend to happen. I don't think we need to resort to communism or anything, but surely a happy middle ground with SOME oversight wouldn't be a bad idea.

So we should only put the hammer on our flag and leave off the sickle for now. The Fed is the institution that created the problems in the first place and now you want to give it even more power. Especial after that BS deal last week giving JP Morgan 30 billion dollars.

 

[dmcowen674]

Originally posted by: smack Down

Originally posted by: Rainsford
I think "the markets" have proven over and over again that, left completely alone, incredibly bad things tend to happen. I don't think we need to resort to communism or anything, but surely a happy middle ground with SOME oversight wouldn't be a bad idea.

So we should only put the hammer on our flag and leave off the sickle for now. The Fed is the institution that created the problems in the first place and now you want to give it even more power. Especial after that BS deal last week giving JP Morgan 30 billion dollars.

Flag and name change is in progress and has been since 2001.

 

[Jaskalas]

Originally posted by: dmcowen674
Flag and name change is in progress and has been since 2001.

Would have been a limited spat of darkness without your side's endorsement. Then again, we knew you had endorsed it since at least FDR so it was only inevitable that you'd sign on as soon as you had to opportunity to claim credit for it.

With 2009's new president approaching you can already taste the sweet sweet expanses of the federal government and the continued restrictions upon the individual for the good of the collective.

 

[LegendKiller]

Originally posted by: smack Down

Originally posted by: Rainsford
I think "the markets" have proven over and over again that, left completely alone, incredibly bad things tend to happen. I don't think we need to resort to communism or anything, but surely a happy middle ground with SOME oversight wouldn't be a bad idea.

So we should only put the hammer on our flag and leave off the sickle for now. The Fed is the institution that created the problems in the first place and now you want to give it even more power. Especial after that BS deal last week giving JP Morgan 30 billion dollars.

The Fed had nothing to do with over 10 trillion dollars of foreign and domestic money flowing into the debt markets. If you have proof they do, then provide it, otherwise, take your hyperbole and go elsewhere.

 

[LegendKiller]

Originally posted by: Rainsford
I think "the markets" have proven over and over again that, left completely alone, incredibly bad things tend to happen. I don't think we need to resort to communism or anything, but surely a happy middle ground with SOME oversight wouldn't be a bad idea.

I work "in the market" and agree 100%. However, some laws should be removed, others changed, yet others enacted, but all must be considered for unintended consequences. Unfortunately, Congress is so knee-jerking that they fail to consider these.

 

[dmcowen674]

Originally posted by: Jaskalas

Originally posted by: dmcowen674
Flag and name change is in progress and has been since 2001.

Would have been a limited spat of darkness without your side's endorsement. Then again, we knew you had endorsed it since at least FDR so it was only inevitable that you'd sign on as soon as you had to opportunity to claim credit for it.

With 2009's new president approaching you can already taste the sweet sweet expanses of the federal government and the continued restrictions upon the individual for the good of the collective.

What are you talking about?

There will be no change in the whitehouse in 2009.

 

[Jhhnn]

Treasury's proposals are empty, an attempt to leave the fox guarding the henhouse, so to speak. But they have to pretend to do something, even if it's wrong.

Gotta love Jaskalas' reference to FDR, the eternal boogeyman of the far Right. It wasn't the constraints of the New Deal that led to the current imbroglio, but rather the slow dismantling of them over the last 25 years, the exploitive genius of Wall St, and complicity from the Fed itself.

There won't be any meaningful change until after the election, if then- this is just more smoke and mirrors from the masters of illusion, the Bush Admin....

 

[LegendKiller]

Originally posted by: Jhhnn
Treasury's proposals are empty, an attempt to leave the fox guarding the henhouse, so to speak. But they have to pretend to do something, even if it's wrong.

Gotta love Jaskalas' reference to FDR, the eternal boogeyman of the far Right. It wasn't the constraints of the New Deal that led to the current imbroglio, but rather the slow dismantling of them over the last 25 years, the exploitive genius of Wall St, and complicity from the Fed itself.

There won't be any meaningful change until after the election, if then- this is just more smoke and mirrors from the masters of illusion, the Bush Admin....

G-S really fucked over the banks on an international arena, the rollback was expected and normal. Better rules need to be thought of.

 

[BansheeX]

Originally posted by: Rainsford
I think "the markets" have proven over and over again that, left completely alone, incredibly bad things tend to happen. I don't think we need to resort to communism or anything, but surely a happy middle ground with SOME oversight wouldn't be a bad idea.

Oversight by whom? Like most socialist thinkers who wrongly blame the free market for what are essentially problems created by government intervention, you assume, somehow, that government is an institution in which you put pure and incorruptible men in a position of controlling the greedy and corruptible. That idealist view and undue trust in other men is exactly what got us here. We've been leaning that way for a long time now, and things continue to get worse. The subprime mess is a direct result of the federal reserve's manipulation of the free market. After the tech bubble collapsed, Greenspan lowered interest rates artificially low to 1% for an entire year to delay a politically inconvenient market correction by getting indebted Americans to keep spending, this time on real estate. That artificial demand for housing created by those interest rates incentivized all the lax lending standards that you abhor and blame on the free market. How can you be so foolish as to assert that this is just some new rogue flaw in the market exploiting a justification for further intervention? The Fed assumes greater and greater power to address greater and greater volatility problems THAT THEY ARE CREATING.

There is no perfect system in which no bad things happen, but a free market is by far the better tradeoff compared to socialist control. Compare it to the gun control argument. Gun crimes happen whether you allow or ban guns, the question then becomes which has less? And the answer is that allowing guns results in the least, because guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens creates a coercive deterrent that prevent a great deal of crimes from ever happening. But because crimes still happen, and those prevented crimes never show up in statistics, people take for granted the prevention, and regard the crimes that do happen as evidence that we need to "do something about it" like passing laws against guns. And for all its good intentions, it ends up having the opposite effect.

Now take the federal reserve. Before the federal reserve act, we had a booming economy with real, sustained growth based on production and at no risk of collapse, but we also had something called bank runs. People who chose to contract with or make deposits in a bank that was following bad lending and reserve practices would catch wind of it and attempt to withdraw en masse, only to find out that the banks were holding a fraction of their depositor's money, sending the bad bank into oblivion and leaving many victims broke. JP Morgan and Rockefeller campaigned to get the central bank instituted and sold it to the American people as a "lender of last resort." As discussed above, people had taken for granted the good things of the gold standard and regarded bank runs as something which necessitated government regulation in the form of a central bank. So the federal reserve act was passed on the day before Christmas (when most of congress was at home with their families - it a gentleman's agreement not to have important legislation put forth on that day). Then ensued the phony boom of the roaring twenties and the subsequent recession, which was quickly turned into a prolonged depression from the fed's contraction of the money supply, as well as Hoover and Roosevelt's orgy of interventionist policies. The interloper to which people had entrusted their wellbeing under the pretense of saving them from bank runs had instead replaced that problem with problems that were fifty times more painful and indiscriminate.

At the time, no one really knew what had caused the depression. They believed it was some natural flaw arising from the free market which made them turn in all their gold when Roosevelt proclaimed "hoarding" their wealth illegal, and Keynes came along and produced an academic theory which conveniently justified what the government had been wanting to do all along: inflate the money supply and spend without resorting to taxation.

So yeah, you might want to do some research on Libertarian stances sometime. These are subtle arguments that are difficult for the average person to understand. It's natural to think that all problems require government action, but you need to realize that:

1. Most people, not excepting those in positions of power, are pursuant to their own interests. Thus, wanting power to be centralized rather than dispersed among men is a very delicate and idealistic thing. Enron may have been bad and scammed its workers, but it's small fries compared to what ills can come of giving government-sanctioned powers to equally corruptible men and telling the sheep it's to combat such activity.

2. Our forefathers considered government to be a necessary evil and wrote a constitution to state explicitly the limited tasks which the government should have. Read it sometime.

 

[soccerballtux]

Originally posted by: smack Down

Originally posted by: Rainsford
I think "the markets" have proven over and over again that, left completely alone, incredibly bad things tend to happen. I don't think we need to resort to communism or anything, but surely a happy middle ground with SOME oversight wouldn't be a bad idea.

So we should only put the hammer on our flag and leave off the sickle for now. The Fed is the institution that created the problems in the first place and now you want to give it even more power. Especial after that BS deal last week giving JP Morgan 30 billion dollars.

Hi.

Are you stupid? Because if the deal didn't go through, BSC would have collapsed by Tuesday for sure, which would have had disastrous consequences for the rest of the economy. You would have been crying and screaming that Bush and the Fed should have done something.

 

[soccerballtux]

Originally posted by: BansheeX

Originally posted by: Rainsford
I think "the markets" have proven over and over again that, left completely alone, incredibly bad things tend to happen. I don't think we need to resort to communism or anything, but surely a happy middle ground with SOME oversight wouldn't be a bad idea.

Oversight by whom? Like most socialist thinkers who wrongly blame the free market for what are essentially problems created by government intervention, you assume, somehow, that government is an institution in which you put pure and incorruptible men in a position of controlling the greedy and corruptible. That idealist view and undue trust in other men is exactly what got us here. We've been leaning that way for a long time now, and things continue to get worse. The subprime mess is a direct result of the federal reserve's manipulation of the free market. After the tech bubble collapsed, Greenspan lowered interest rates artificially low to 1% for an entire year to delay a politically inconvenient market correction by getting indebted Americans to keep spending, this time on real estate. That artificial demand for housing created by those interest rates incentivized all the lax lending standards that you abhor and blame on the free market. How can you be so foolish as to assert that this is just some new rogue flaw in the market exploiting a justification for further intervention? The Fed assumes greater and greater power to address greater and greater volatility problems THAT THEY ARE CREATING.

Well there was also 9-11 to think about which, for some reason, had everybody up in arms. Media coverage didn't help much either that "AMERICA IS AT WAR" and sensationalism like that. They had to lower the interest rates to keep up the liquidity.

 

[Jaskalas]

Originally posted by: Jhhnn
Gotta love Jaskalas' reference to FDR, the eternal boogeyman of the far Right. It wasn't the constraints of the New Deal that led to the current imbroglio, but rather the slow dismantling of them over the last 25 years, the exploitive genius of Wall St, and complicity from the Fed itself.

I never said it created it, you can stop the lies of misrepresentation. I said clearly that this is more of the same. FDR is the most memorable American origin for the expanse of government for the good of the collective. Federal takeover of our financial institutions is the expansion of the very same ideology.

I am opposed to it, and you are in favor of it, isn?t that right?

 

[soccerballtux]

Originally posted by: BansheeX

Originally posted by: Rainsford
I think "the markets" have proven over and over again that, left completely alone, incredibly bad things tend to happen. I don't think we need to resort to communism or anything, but surely a happy middle ground with SOME oversight wouldn't be a bad idea.

Now take the federal reserve. Before the federal reserve act, we had a booming economy with real, sustained growth based on production and at no risk of collapse, but we also had something called bank runs. People who chose to contract with or make deposits in a bank that was following bad lending and reserve practices would catch wind of it and attempt to withdraw en masse, only to find out that the banks were holding a fraction of their depositor's money, sending the bad bank into oblivion and leaving many victims broke. JP Morgan and Rockefeller campaigned to get the central bank instituted and sold it to the American people as a "lender of last resort." As discussed above, people had taken for granted the good things of the gold standard and regarded bank runs as something which necessitated government regulation in the form of a central bank. So the federal reserve act was passed on the day before Christmas (when most of congress was at home with their families - it a gentleman's agreement not to have important legislation put forth on that day). Then ensued the phony boom of the roaring twenties and the subsequent recession, which was quickly turned into a prolonged depression from the fed's contraction of the money supply, as well as Hoover and Roosevelt's orgy of interventionist policies. The interloper to which people had entrusted their wellbeing under the pretense of saving them from bank runs had instead replaced that problem with problems that were fifty times more painful and indiscriminate.

At the time, no one really knew what had caused the depression. They believed it was some natural flaw arising from the free market which made them turn in all their gold when Roosevelt proclaimed "hoarding" their wealth illegal, and Keynes came along and produced an academic theory which conveniently justified what the government had been wanting to do all along: inflate the money supply and spend without resorting to taxation.

So yeah, you might want to do some research on Libertarian stances sometime. These are subtle arguments that are difficult for the average person to understand. It's natural to think that all problems require government action, but you need to realize that:

1. Most people, not excepting those in positions of power, are pursuant to their own interests. Thus, wanting power to be centralized rather than dispersed among men is a very delicate and idealistic thing. Enron may have been bad and scammed its workers, but it's small fries compared to what ills can come of giving government-sanctioned powers to equally corruptible men and telling the sheep it's to combat such activity.

2. Our forefathers considered government to be a necessary evil and wrote a constitution to state explicitly the limited tasks which the government should have. Read it sometime.

I agree with what you're saying, but I think we differ on how much faith we have in the free market. I'm taking the view that there's simply too much money to be made, and not enough consequences, for a laissez fair economy. It's already been tried in the past and it didn't work out well. People in the know already make so much money. Were there no regulation and no ultimate authority that had no political repercussions to their actions, I'm fairly certain the people in the know would be making far more than they're making now. Perhaps I'm misreading what you're saying and that you're only arguing against this new power given to the Fed.

Keep in mind the Fed is at the mercy of our politicians. All it takes is enough crap to hit the fans and suddenly the politicians have access to easy campaign material. These pressures have been enough in the past to reign in the Fed and get them to do the Right Thing, such as their monetarist hiatus instituted during Jimmy Carter's presidency; and I think they're still enough to keep them in check. Besides, the Fed is composed of people who have a vested interest in keeping the economy functioning as effectively and efficiently as possible. Maybe I'm just being naive.

 

[BansheeX]

Originally posted by: soccerballtux

Originally posted by: smack Down

Originally posted by: Rainsford
I think "the markets" have proven over and over again that, left completely alone, incredibly bad things tend to happen. I don't think we need to resort to communism or anything, but surely a happy middle ground with SOME oversight wouldn't be a bad idea.

So we should only put the hammer on our flag and leave off the sickle for now. The Fed is the institution that created the problems in the first place and now you want to give it even more power. Especial after that BS deal last week giving JP Morgan 30 billion dollars.

Hi.

Are you stupid? Because if the deal didn't go through, BSC would have collapsed by Tuesday for sure, which would have had disastrous consequences for the rest of the economy. You would have been crying and screaming that Bush and the Fed should have done something.

You're assuming something that you probably shouldn't be, which is that manipulating interest rates, inflating the money supply, and rewarding bad behavior has a better overall long-term effect on the economy than letting the market correct itself. If you're drunk, or high on drugs, you have to go through withdrawal. The more someone juices you up to avoid feeling that short-term pain, the harder they make the eventual fall. It doesn't matter that the clueless want the gravy train to go on forever any more than if a drug addict wants to stay high forever. It can't happen. You can either let the market correct every so often with a recession or you can have the fed step in and turn them into depressions. That's your choice. The Fed does not have a magic wand to fix problems. They couldn't magically fix bear stearns, they had to create new liquidity out of thin air and debase the purchasing power of every other dollar. That's right, some rich fucks at Bear Stearns screwed up in Fed-created speculation, and every citizen is now forced to pay for it via inflationary prices under the pretense that letting Bear Stearns die would have been worse for them. J.P. Morgan gobbles them up in a sweetheart deal and we all live happily ever after, right? Wrong. Sad that shit has to go one for this long. Undone by their own socialist idealism, people will be burning dollars as firewood while begging for the true culprits to save them from the "ravages of the free market."

 

[superstition]

Capitalism eats itself.

 

[MadRat]

Originally posted by: superstition
Capitalism eats its children's children's children.

Fixed.

 

[soccerballtux]

Originally posted by: BansheeX

Originally posted by: soccerballtux

Originally posted by: smack Down

Originally posted by: Rainsford
I think "the markets" have proven over and over again that, left completely alone, incredibly bad things tend to happen. I don't think we need to resort to communism or anything, but surely a happy middle ground with SOME oversight wouldn't be a bad idea.

So we should only put the hammer on our flag and leave off the sickle for now. The Fed is the institution that created the problems in the first place and now you want to give it even more power. Especial after that BS deal last week giving JP Morgan 30 billion dollars.

Hi.

Are you stupid? Because if the deal didn't go through, BSC would have collapsed by Tuesday for sure, which would have had disastrous consequences for the rest of the economy. You would have been crying and screaming that Bush and the Fed should have done something.

You're assuming something that you probably shouldn't be, which is that manipulating interest rates, inflating the money supply, and rewarding bad behavior has a better overall long-term effect on the economy than letting the market correct itself. If you're drunk, or high on drugs, you have to go through withdrawal. The more someone juices you up to avoid feeling that short-term pain, the harder they make the eventual fall. It doesn't matter that the clueless want the gravy train to go on forever any more than if a drug addict wants to stay high forever. It can't happen. You can either let the market correct every so often with a recession or you can have the fed step in and turn them into depressions. That's your choice. The Fed does not have a magic wand to fix problems. They couldn't magically fix bear stearns, they had to create new liquidity out of thin air and debase the purchasing power of every other dollar. That's right, some rich fucks at Bear Stearns screwed up in Fed-created speculation, and every citizen is now forced to pay for it via inflationary prices under the pretense that letting Bear Stearns die would have been worse for them. J.P. Morgan gobbles them up in a sweetheart deal and we all live happily ever after, right? Wrong. Sad that shit has to go one for this long. Undone by their own socialist idealism, people will be burning dollars as firewood while begging for the true culprits to save them from the free market which ravaged them.

I see what you're saying, but I still think it's a necessary evil. I don't think we can know unless we just tried it. When the economy tanks and every investor is wetting his pants and withholding all his money and not investing, a large portion of us lose our jobs.

I'd like to read some PhD macroeconomists take on a completely free market. Laissez faire failed in the past. What's different this time around?

edit: So a lot of us lose our jobs, it becomes insanely cheap to employ us, so cheap that the investors have to be stupid to not employ us.

I can't think the whole thing through, there's too much I don't know and we'd probably have to be omnipotent to be able to reason through it all. I'd be surprised if anyone could, really. I'd love to hear a full rational argument for what deterrents there are to keep companies from making the decision that makes them handfuls of cash now and for a year, but which slaughters the company in a year (like with BSC). What keeps them from doing this, what keeps history from being repeated? The shareholders would probably go for it too, just like they take the payout now rather than have the company invest that money in future potential revenues.

 

[BansheeX]

Originally posted by: soccerballtux
I agree with what you're saying, but I think we differ on how much faith we have in the free market. I'm taking the view that there's simply too much money to be made, and not enough consequences, for a laissez fair economy. It's already been tried in the past and it didn't work out well. People in the know already make so much money. Were there no regulation and no ultimate authority that had no political repercussions to their actions, I'm fairly certain the people in the know would be making far more than they're making now. Perhaps I'm misreading what you're saying and that you're only arguing against this new power given to the Fed.

What do you mean it didn't work? At no point in American history has the rate of real growth, charity, or living wage been greater than in the 19th century when intervention was at its least and when the country's money was tied to gold. You have to stop looking at objectives for regulations and start looking at the results. Look at us. At no point in history have we been more regulatory and socialist, and we are on the verge of a hyperinflationary depression. We used to run trade deficits to build factories and infrastructure. Now we run them to consume. All of our manufacturing jobs have been turned into self-serving service jobs entirely dependent on foreign creditors subsidizing our consumption. That makes us very vulnerable.

As I tried to explain in my gun control analogy, there are self-regulating factors that people ignore or don't realize, which causes them to overreact into supporting centralized controls when inevitable bad things do arise. And that centralized control, more often than not, overrides the dispersed self-regulation and puts the regulation at the behest of a few corruptible and power-driven individuals. You think the banks are these selfless individuals to whom we can entrust regulatory powers? Why do you think the Obama, Clinton, and McCains of the world are getting all the corporate and media influence? They're the most regulatory of them all. It's because special interests know what many "regulations" do: they reduce competition and benefit a privileged few while fooling everyone else into believing it benefits them. Look at these no-bid contracts, government subsidies, and tax breaks some of these big companies are getting. Look at some of this legislation the FDA passes which declares certain benign things unsafe using biased research results so that domestic companies can price gouge (example: Stevia, a natural sugar substitute with no patent, was banned in the 90s due to artificial sweetener lobbying). Is it any wonder we have so many monopolies when so much of our legislation is bought by corporate influence made possible by these ABC agencies? They also make the general populace stupid and complacent, because if you believe yourself to be protected from someone else, you lower your guard and fail to do research you otherwise would have done.

Originally posted by: soccerballtuxKeep in mind the Fed is at the mercy of our politicians. All it takes is enough crap to hit the fans and suddenly the politicians have access to easy campaign material. These pressures have been enough in the past to reign in the Fed and get them to do the Right Thing, such as their monetarist hiatus instituted during Jimmy Carter's presidency; and I think they're still enough to keep them in check. Besides, the Fed is composed of people who have a vested interest in keeping the economy functioning as effectively and efficiently as possible. Maybe I'm just being naive.

Today's democrats (socialists) and Republicans (neo-cons) love Keynesian policies and the central banking system. Back when we were on gold, the government couldn't just inflate like mad to avoid taxing (asking) the people to finance their pet projects. Fiat currency is a seductive way for government to tax people without them actually realizing it. Need a trillion dollars for the war? Create and borrow. Need a trillion dollars for health care? Same thing. Either way, you aren't getting directly taxed, just a delayed, incremental devaluation of your purchasing power which you will blame on the producers instead. "Grrrr, those evil farmers and energy companies are colluding together and gouging us again, honey!" Wrong, your money's value is being destroyed. The federal government has simply grown all out of proportion and is becoming itself a monopolistic extension of corporate interests.

 

[smack Down]

Originally posted by: soccerballtux

Originally posted by: smack Down

Originally posted by: Rainsford
I think "the markets" have proven over and over again that, left completely alone, incredibly bad things tend to happen. I don't think we need to resort to communism or anything, but surely a happy middle ground with SOME oversight wouldn't be a bad idea.

So we should only put the hammer on our flag and leave off the sickle for now. The Fed is the institution that created the problems in the first place and now you want to give it even more power. Especial after that BS deal last week giving JP Morgan 30 billion dollars.

Hi.

Are you stupid? Because if the deal didn't go through, BSC would have collapsed by Tuesday for sure, which would have had disastrous consequences for the rest of the economy. You would have been crying and screaming that Bush and the Fed should have done something.

I'm not a BSC share holder nor did I loan them any money. I could care less if a bunch of trust fund babies lost money.

 

[Butterbean]

"The proposal is part of a sweeping blueprint to overhaul the nation?s hodgepodge of financial regulatory agencies, which many experts say failed to recognize rampant excesses in mortgage lending until after they set off what is now the worst financial calamity in decades"


People saw the excesses a long time ago and none of this is a surprise. The Community Reinvestment Act was central to this mess as well and banks never wanted it. Now the same people who forced it have more "ideas". This is "hurt and rescue" principle at work

 

[Rainsford]

Originally posted by: Butterbean



"The proposal is part of a sweeping blueprint to overhaul the nation?s hodgepodge of financial regulatory agencies, which many experts say failed to recognize rampant excesses in mortgage lending until after they set off what is now the worst financial calamity in decades"


People saw the excesses a long time ago and none of this is a surprise. The Community Reinvestment Act was central to this mess as well and banks never wanted it. Now the same people who forced it have more "ideas". This is "hurt and rescue" principle at work

Come on, are you really blaming the government for greedy lenders and stupid borrowers (and I suppose those adjectives work the other way around as well)?