700 Billion dollars.. say goodbye

Vyddo

Active Member
Joined
Sep 26, 2008
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I'm angry, republican, democrat.. anyone that votes for passage of this bill can consider themselves replaced next election.

The bill accomplishes nothing, were paying this incredible amount of money for a psychological boost to the market that is NOT real, that has no chance of resolving anything.. That only makes the problem bigger and pushes the immediate repercussions a short distance into the future.

I'm furious.
 
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I'm angry, republican, democrat.. anyone that votes for passage of this bill can consider themselves replaced next election.

The bill accomplishes nothing, were paying this incredible amount of money for a psychological boost to the market that is NOT real, that has no chance of resolving anything.. That only makes the problem bigger and pushes the immediate repercussions a short distance into the future.

I'm furious.

This is less money than Obama proposed sending to Africa to "fight poverty." Let us hope that his bill in the Senate demanding this gets killed now.
 
This is why we are having banking problems today. This law was put in after the Great Depression. Changed in 1999

Clinton Signs Legislation Overhauling Banking Laws

WASHINGTON, Nov. 12, 1999 (Reuters) - President Clinton signed into law today a sweeping overhaul of Depression-era banking laws. The measure lifts barriers in the industry and allows banks, securities firms and insurance companies to merge and sell each other's products.
"This legislation is truly historic," President Clinton told a packed audience of lawmakers and top financial regulators. "We have done right by the American people."
The bill repeals parts of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act and the 1956 Bank Holding Company Act to level the domestic playing field for United States financial companies and allow them to compete better in the evolving global financial marketplace.
Analysts and industry leaders say the measure will probably fuel a wave of mergers as companies compete to build financial supermarkets offering all the services customers need under one roof.
Financial stocks were winners on Wall Street today, with J.P. Morgan & Company, Citigroup, American Express and Merrill Lynch all posting big gains. That helped the Dow Jones industrial average end up 174.02 points, at 10,769.32.
The Senate approved the final bill by 90 to 8 on Nov. 4 and the House followed suit by a vote of 362 to 57. Congress had previously made almost a dozen unsuccessful attempts over the last 25 years to revise the statutes, which had increasingly come to be viewed as anachronisms.
"The world changes, and Congress and the laws have to change with it," said Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, chairman of the Banking Committee and one of the bill's prime sponsors.
Opponents said it would have the opposite effect, creating behemoths that will raise fees, violate customers' privacy by sharing and selling their personal data, and put the stability of the financial system at risk.
The privacy issue was a key focus in the long and often heated negotiations that produced a compromise bill, and President Clinton made clear he still wanted to see more done to safeguard consumers' personal financial information.
Clinton's support for the legislation comes despite warnings from critics and consumer activists that it could lead to price-gouging of consumers and the erosion of their privacy by newly formed financial conglomerates that are too big and powerful.
"The bill is anti-consumer and anti-community," advocate Ralph Nader declared. "It will mean higher prices and fewer choices for low-, moderate- and middle-income families across the nation."
 
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You are completely wrong - the repeal of Glass-Steagall was way overdue, helped the US compete against european banks who long combined savings and investments, and was not at all responsible for the current crisis. This mantra is being circulated to irrationally support the re-regulation hysteria, regulation being the cause of this crisis and several others

Rich Lowry points out that the institutions that were mixed are exactly the ones that don't have to be bailed out:

http://townhall.com/columnists/RichLowry/2008/09/22/is_phil_gramm_to_blame

the [Glass-Steagal] legislation appears to have alleviated the current crisis rather than making it worse. Big, diversified financial institutions have been weathering the crunch better than anyone else and have occasionally swooped in to lessen the pain. Bank of America acquired Merrill Lynch, which would have been impossible prior to Gramm's deregulation. Otherwise, Merrill would either have gone under or been bailed out by the taxpayers. Similarly, J.P. Morgan wouldn't have taken over Bear Stearns, and Barclays Bank wouldn't be considering buying Lehman Brothers.

Indeed, we've witnessed the end of the era of the large investment bank, with the dramatic decision of the last two firms standing, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, to transform themselves into traditional bank holding companies. The investment-bank model of relying on short-term markets for funding was no longer workable. Instead, Goldman and Morgan will rely more on less risky sources of funding, as regular banks do. Would we really want a 1930s law saying, "No, sorry, you have to remain pure investment banks and go bust"?

The cause of the crisis is just as I and a few other people here have stated, and also an increasing number of commentators. From NR discussing the Clinton-era portion of the REAL cause, the Carter/Clinton Community Reinvestment Act:

Franklin Raines, the Clinton-appointed former head of Fannie Mae from 1998 to 2004, made it his top priority to make mortgages easier to get for people with poor credit, few assets and little money for a down payment.

The Clinton administration, meanwhile, reinterpreted the Jimmy Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act to politicize lending practices. Under the CRA, the government forced banks to prove they weren't "redlining" - i.e., discriminating against minorities - by approving loans to minorities and various left-wing "community group" shakedown artists whether they were bad risks or not. (A young Barack Obama got his start with exactly these sorts of groups.) Sen. Phil Gramm called it a vast extortion scheme against America's banks. Still, the banks were perfectly happy to pass the risky loans to Raines' Fannie Mae, which was happy to buy them up.

That's because Raines was transforming Fannie Mae from a boring but stable financial institution dedicated to making homes more affordable into a risky venture that abused its special status as a "Government Sponsored Enterprise" (GSE) for Raines' personal profit. Fannie bought the bad loans and bundled them together with good ones. Wall Street was glad to buy up these mortgage securities because Fannie Mae was deemed a government-insured behemoth "too big to fail." And others followed Fannie's lead.
 
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