STOCK MARKET WATCH - Friday, 27 January 2012

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25. Is Obama's 'Economic Populism' for Real?

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/is-obamas-economic-populism-for-real-20120126

There is a lot to digest in a recent series of events on the Prosecuting Wall Street front – the two biggest being Barack Obama’s decision to make New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman the co-chair of a committee to investigate mortgage and securitization fraud, and the numerous rumors and leaks about an impending close to the foreclosure settlement saga.

There is already a great debate afoot about the meaning of these two news stories, which surely are related in some form or another. Some observers worry that Schneiderman, who over the summer was building a rep as the Eliot Ness of the Wall Street fraud era, has sold out and is abandoning his hard-line stance on foreclosure in return for a splashy federal posting.

Others looked at his appointment in conjunction with other recent developments – like the news that Tim Geithner won’t be kept on and Obama’s comments about a millionaire’s tax – and concluded that Barack Obama had finally gotten religion and decided to go after our corruption problem in earnest.

At the very least, Obama’s recent acts were interpreted as a public move toward economic populism: if the president was looking to associate himself with that word, he did a good job, since there were literally hundreds of headlines about Obama’s "populism" the day after his State of the Union speech.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/is-obamas-economic-populism-for-real-20120126#ixzz1key9ZLLt