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Give Wall Street bankers trillions in free money from the Federal Reserve or promise corporate CEO's a 20% tax cut, subsidies, tax credits for shipping jobs overseas, deferred interest on their hedge fund operations, deregulation of derivates markets, etc., etc., etc., and they will vote for Republicans every time. That is the part of Romney's "gifts" speech that he conveniently forgot to mention. Both Democrats and Republicans deliver free stuff to their constituencies in exchange for campaign financing and votes.
ReplyDelete--David
The country is doomed and any thought of getting it back is foolhardy. No one in Washington will do what is in the best interests of the country, rather than their own re-election. Dems promise everything to their constituents who vote for them for fear of losing their "goodies." Where we should NOT be giving away money and things but rather allowing for individual responsibility to handle the problems that occurs in everyone's lives.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the bankers, I would have let them fail.No tax credits for moving jobs overseas but also allow lower taxes so that foreign profits can come back to the US, that has not happened and will not under Obama.
BTW, derivative markets were never "de-regulated", the fact is that they never were regulated as the staffs of the SEC did not understand them enough to regulate and neither did the CEOs of many of the companies that were offering them! Shame on them, if you can't understand the product, it should not be offered. But there were billions being made, so these greedy guys turned their eyes to the dollars and not the safety of what they were selling.
Greed is a universal human trait, it can only be managed, it cannot be eliminated. We need regulation but not onerous rules that in the end do not enhance the safety but protect the SEC and other government enterprises from accusation that they did not do enough.
"A few days after the Supreme Court made George W. Bush president in 2000, Gramm stuck something called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act into the budget bill. Nobody knew that the Texas senator was slipping America a 262 page poison pill. The Gramm Guts America Act was designed to keep regulators from controlling new financial tools described as credit "swaps." These are instruments like sub-prime mortgages bundled up and sold as securities. Under the Gramm law, neither the SEC nor the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) were able to examine financial institutions like hedge funds or investment banks to guarantee they had the assets necessary to cover losses they were guaranteeing.
ReplyDeleteThis isn't small beer we are talking about here. The market for these fancy financial instruments they don't expect us little people to understand is estimated at $60 trillion annually, which amounts to almost four times the entire US stock market."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-moore/a-nation-of-village-idiot_b_127340.html
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Up to this time, at least some people (most notably Brooksley Born) at CFTC were trying to regulate derivates in the wake of the Long-Term Capital Management fiasco. Gramm and Clinton put an end to it once and for all. The Wall Street derivative markets were then totally deregulated.
--David