Wall Street Reform: FDR vs Obama [View all]

[eniwetok]

When FDR came into office in March 1933 he and the Democrats faced head on the dangerous aspects of an unregulated economy and passed structural reforms within 3 months with the 1933 Banking Act. It was that Act that included Glass Steagall.

When faced with another collapsed economy in 2008 we might expect the braindead ideologues in the GOP to refuse to reflect on how their ideas on deregulation caused the collapse and how dangerous it was NOT to make major reforms. But Obama should have known better. Yet he and key Dems refused to do what FDR did: quickly introduce and pass key reforms. In March 2009 Obama told the Wall Street perps that he stood between them and the people with the pitchforks.

Reform was stretched out and Dodd Frank wasn't passed until July 2010... 18 MONTHS after Obama took office.

Given the scope of the problem Dodd Frank was a pathetically weak bill and it would take additional years to be implemented. As of early 2015 the SEC was still writing rules to implement DF https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/dodd-frank/derivatives.shtml In the mean time the too big to fail banks were now bigger and time bombs in the economy were still ticking. And ultimately the Obama administration refused to prosecute any of these Wall Street thieves and sociopaths. They got away with paying large fines... other people's money.

So here we all, 8 years after the crash. The government is now trillions more in debt, the FED has exhausted it's main arsenal... interest rates, and the world economy is looking unstable again.

Should there be another crash... will history look back and curse the GOP and Obama for refusing to fix the core defects in the economy?

I suspect so. We desperately needed another FDR and instead we got a corporate Dem as president.