Would Bernie supporters be so kind as to define "Wall Street" for us?

[RiverLover]

20. BS

THIS is WALL STREET

How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform
It's bad enough that the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law. Even worse is the way they did it - with a big assist from Congress and the White House.
By Matt Taibbi May 10, 2012



Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he'd dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. "These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history," the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. "In history."

This was supposed to be the big one. At 2,300 pages, the new law ostensibly rewrote the rules for Wall Street. It was going to put an end to predatory lending in the mortgage markets, crack down on hidden fees and penalties in credit contracts, and create a powerful new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to safeguard ordinary consumers. Big banks would be banned from gambling with taxpayer money, and a new set of rules would limit speculators from making the kind of crazy-ass bets that cause wild spikes in the price of food and energy. There would be no more AIGs, and the world would never again face a financial apocalypse when a bank like Lehman Brothers went bankrupt.

Most importantly, even if any of that fiendish crap ever did happen again, Dodd-Frank guaranteed we wouldn't be expected to pay for it. "The American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street's mistakes," Obama promised. "There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts. Period."

Two years later, Dodd-Frank is groaning on its deathbed. The giant reform bill turned out to be like the fish reeled in by Hemingway's Old Man – no sooner caught than set upon by sharks that strip it to nothing long before it ever reaches the shore. In a furious below-the-radar effort at gutting the law – roundly despised by Washington's Wall Street paymasters – a troop of water-carrying Eric Cantor Republicans are speeding nine separate bills through the House, all designed to roll back the few genuinely toothy portions left in Dodd-Frank. With the Quislingian covert assistance of Democrats, both in Congress and in the White House, those bills could pass through the House and the Senate with little or no debate, with simple floor votes – by a process usually reserved for things like the renaming of post offices or a nonbinding resolution celebrating Amelia Earhart's birthday.

The fate of Dodd-Frank over the past two years is an object lesson in the government's inability to institute even the simplest and most obvious reforms, especially if those reforms happen to clash with powerful financial interests. From the moment it was signed into law, lobbyists and lawyers have fought regulators over every line in the rulemaking process......snippp....

Upon entering office, FDR was in exactly the same position Obama found himself in after his inauguration in 2009. Then, as now, the American economy was in tatters after the bursting of a massive financial bubble, brought on when speculators borrowed huge sums and gambled on unregistered securities in largely unregulated exchanges. This mania for instant riches led to an explosion of Wall Street fraud and manipulation, creating a mountain of illusory growth divorced from the real-world economy: Of the $50 billion in securities sold in America in the 1920s, half turned out to be worthless.

Roosevelt's response to all of this was to pass a number of sweeping new laws that focused on a single theme: protecting consumers by forcing the business of Wall Street into the light. The Securities Act of 1933 required all publicly traded companies to register themselves and offer prospectuses to investors; the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 forced publicly traded companies to make regular financial disclosures; and the Commodity Exchange Act of 1936 required all commodities and futures to be traded on organized exchanges. FDR also created the FDIC to protect bank depositors (through an insurance fund paid for by the banks themselves) and passed the Glass-Steagall Act to separate insurance companies, investment banks and commercial banks. Post-New Deal, if you put money in a bank, you knew it was safe, and if you bought stock, you knew what you were buying.

This reform strategy worked for more than half a century – and it offered Obama a clear outline of how to respond to the crash he faced. What made 2008 possible was that Wall Street had moved its speculative frenzy away from the regulated exchange system created by FDR, and into darker, less-regulated markets that had coalesced around brand-new financial innovations like credit default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations. It wasn't that the old system had broken down; Wall Street had just moved the playground.

All Obama needed to do to rescue the economy and protect consumers was to make sure that the new playground had some rules. That meant moving swaps and other derivatives onto open exchanges, making sure that federally insured banks that dabbled in those dangerous markets retained more capital, and coming up with some kind of plan to prevent the next AIG or Lehman Brothers disaster – i.e., a plan for unwinding failing companies that wouldn't require federal bailouts.....

........Then, behind the closed doors of Congress, Wall Street lobbyists and their allies got to work. Though many of the new regulatory concepts survived in the final bill, most of them wound up whittled down to such an extreme degree that they were barely recognizable in the end. Over the course of a ferocious year of negotiations in the House and the Senate, the rules on swaps were riddled with loopholes: One initially promising rule preventing federally insured banks from trading in risky derivatives ultimately ended up exempting a huge chunk of the swaps market from the new law. The Volcker Rule banning proprietary gambling survived, but not before getting its brains beaten out in last-minute conference negotiations; Wall Street first won broad exemptions for mutual funds, insurers and trusts, and then, with the aid of both Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, managed to secure a lunatic and arbitrary numerical exemption that allows banks to gamble up to three percent of their "Tier 1" capital, a number that for big banks stretches to the billions.

Then there was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which went from being a powerful, independent agency run by Elizabeth Warren to a smaller bureau within the Federal Reserve System run by - well, anyone but Elizabeth Warren. With Geithner and Republicans in Congress blocking her once-inevitable appointment, we no longer had Warren playing watchdog to Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke - instead we had new CFPB head Richard Cordray, a former Ohio attorney general who enjoys far less of a popular mandate than Warren, forced to operate within the bureaucracy of Bernanke's Fed.

But the best example of how the watering-down process helped make Dodd-Frank ripe for a later killing was the question of Too Big to Fail. Obama, Geithner and the Democratic leadership in Congress never seriously entertained enacting the most obvious and necessary reform at all – breaking up the so-called "systemically important financial institutions" (the congressional term for "banks so huge we'll have to bail them out if they collapse&quot . Rather than simply stopping these firms from getting so big that they'd blow up the universe in a collapse, the Democrats opted for a half-clever semantic trick, claiming they had solved the future bailout question with Title II of the Dodd-Frank Act, known as the "Orderly Liquidation Authority" or "OLA" section of the bill.


.......BIG interesting sad SNIP.............

Under normal circumstances, seeing the Republicans send a bunch of evil bills like the derivatives exemption to the Democrat-controlled Senate wouldn't scare reform advocates too much. But in March and April, something happened that sent progressives into a veritable panic – the passage of the so-called JOBS Act, a sweeping, bank-fellating deregulatory law that rolled back a smorgasbord of regulations designed to protect investors from fraud in the IPO markets. The White House, eager to greenlight "crowdfunding" investments and a handful of other sensible reforms contained in the bill, leaned on the Senate leadership to send the measure straight to the floor for a vote. That meant this monster deregulatory bill went directly into the books with minimal testimony, no committee hearings and no real debate of any kind.

Now, in the wake of the JOBS Act fiasco, many reform advocates expect the same scenario to repeat itself with the nine bills to roll back Dodd-Frank.

...........big huge fascinating sad SNIP......


That's the underlying problem with cracking down on Wall Street: Our political-economic system has grown too knotted and unmanageable for democratic rule.

While it's incredibly difficult to get a regulatory reform passed, it's far easier – and more profitable to politicians – to kill it. Creating legislation is a tough process. But watering down legislation? Strangling it with lawsuits and comment letters and blue-ribbon committees? Not so tough, it turns out.

You can't buy votes in a democracy, at least not directly, but our democracy is run through a bureaucracy. Human beings can cast a vote, or rally together during protests and elections, but real people – even committed professionals – get tired of running through mazes of motions and countermotions, or reading thousands of pages about swaps-execution facilities and NRSROs. They will fight through it for five days, or maybe even six, but on the seventh they will watch a baseball game, or Tanked, instead of diving into that morass of hellish acronyms one more time.

But money never gets tired. It never gets frustrated. And it thinks that drilling holes in Dodd-Frank is every bit as interesting as The Book of Mormon or Kate Upton naked. The system has become too complex for flesh-and-blood people, who make the mistake of thinking that passing a new law means the end of the discussion, when it's really just the beginning of a war.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-wall-street-killed-financial-reform-20120510#ixzz428jPYw6m
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