FDIC Chair Sheila Bair says Wall Street regulation won’t get done by end of 2009 because lawmakers can not come to a consensus The lawmakers who rushed to cram down taxpayers throats and push the much maligned TARP legislation through last year are the same ones trying to cram down legislation for financial haul by year-end.
According to Bloomberg,
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, who are leading efforts to advance the legislation, have said they are determined to pass a law by the end of this year. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner pressed Congress to act this year, telling Frank’s committee on Sept. 23 that “time is the enemy of reform.”
I say not so fast, Mr. Barney Frank. Mr. Frank was one of the leading fear-mongerers that saw fit to extort more than $800 billion of taxpayer dollars to rescue banksters. This extortion by another name is called protection-racketeering. Lawmakers told us they were extorting those taxpayer dollars for our own good. Their racketering behavior last year paralleled the mafioso.
Let’s take our time, and hopefully get this right. Congress needs to straightjacket the financial industry, they have exceeded their role and function in society. Their role needs to be reduced to simple social utility. Utility banks that do not creating bogus toxic opaque securities to peddle to investors which they then insure with credit default swaps. That innovation has to end. Securities must be transparent and regulated and traded on an exchange. CDS must go. Too Big To Fail must go more than anything else. Every bank must have a “living will” as an exit strategy for worst case scenario planning.
Sheila Bair concurs:
Time is not the enemy of reform, Mr. Frank. Only a fool rushes in to get things done just to say they did something. No, prudent lawmakers will straightjacket the industry and get it done right so taxpayers no longer explicitly guarantee irresponsible criminal behavior of banks.
