It was only a few months ago that financial reform was on the top of everyone's to-do list. Now it seems the failing efforts at reforming the health care system has sapped all the energy out of reforming Wall Street.
Sweeping regulatory reform of the financial sector-thought to be a 2009 legislative given just four months ago-may now come down to a piece-meal approach, with the White House and its allies happy to see a couple prized components signed into law this year.
"I think it's unraveling,' says former FDIC Chairman William Isaac. "It is hard for me to see how this legislation gets done this year."
...
The diminished prospects are more than just a crowded legislative agenda with equally complicated-yet higher-profile-reform initiatives on health care and energy. The growing lack of urgency also seems to reflect both human nature and political reality.
The financial crisis of a year ago is now more like a distant memory than a call to action. And the financial reforms themselves may be more controversial and less open to compromise or consensus than originally thought by both the White House and Congressional leaders.
You can now see why the corporate media has pushed so hard the "Green Shoots" talk - if things aren't bad then there is no urgency.
"I know they know they way over-reached," says Corker, who along with Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) has introduced stand-alone legislation on resolution authority.
"The administration put up such a bad proposal, a difficult job has been made nearly impossible," says Isaac. "They didn't address the problems they needed to address and addressed a bunch of problems they didn't need to address that had nothing to do with the crisis. You make enemies out of people needlessly."
Some observers say that was the case almost from the start.
Or maybe it was by design.
The proposals also challenged the status quo of the financial services industry, which publicly supported the reforms in general but lobbied against many of the particulars behind closed doors.
"There's a lot of problems with this regulatory reform, so it could easily slip to next year," says one knowledgeable industry representative.
Here's an idea. How about we roll banking regulations back to 1979 and work from there?
yup, we've been watching it
and part of the problem is the public attention waned. Part of this is the media faux paus populism. They get on there about "socialism" or "death panels" and brew ha ha to just divert public outrage.
They kind of grab outrage and spin it to some corporate agenda.
Then, I think people are plain worried about their own financial survival, which has also caused public attention to waiver.
One of the reasons I try to write up as many of the Financial Services Committee hearings as possible.
This should be priority #1, above health care frankly.
How we got here
The one thing that has been completely absent from discussion about banking reform, outside of Glass-Steagall on the internet, is rolling back deregulation.
People don't seem to realize that there were 4 or 5 major deregulation acts since 1979.
I think I'm going to write a blog about it. People should get a better idea of where we've come from and how much we've lost along the way. They should also know that two of the largest financial deregulations happened when the Democrats controlled both the White House and both houses of Congress.
make a nice history
there are also a few but back from 2008 on EP for reference.
But I don't think it's been succinctly presented, even in journal or MSM articles.
Forgive my presumption, but
would you please think about covering, in such a blog, the following items: Group of Thirty (G30) and their push for the widespread adoption of derivatives; JPMorgan Chase's report: Glass-Steagall: Overdue For Repeal; the creation of the Credit Default Swap within JPMorgan (by Blythe Masters, who is head of SIFMA, I believe, and still at JPM) as well as the BISTRO, and the Derivatives Policy Group, which pushed for the "voluntary regulation" of derivatives, as well as the FSMA and CSMA legislation, and the ownership of those exchanges and "pricing" organizations such as InterContinental Exchange, Markit Group, etc., etc.
(Thanks, your blogs are far better than I could ever write.)
I Had a Chart on That
I may have posted before: (Hope it fits.)
I just ran across a most interesting list of all the bailouts since 1980. Very interesting. Maybe I'll write it up.
Excellent chart
I hope you don't mind if I add it to my article that I've already prepared.
That's Why I Put it Here
Top shelf article, BTW. Proud to contribute to it.
Pluto FYI
EP has a lot more features for formatting than DK as well as Soapblox sites.
We have a "image zoom" if a graph doesn't fit.
ZOOM, just too cool is the admin forum on how to use it.
It won't port to DK or other sites but it really helps to zoom into those detail graphs that are too big to fit on a blog.
This is Good!
I'll spend some time learning the site better. I have a vast chart collection at this point. Hope to make more use of it here.
we do requests too
and you might check out the admin forum, where I try to document whatever goodie I added to the site.