Make Megabanks Tell the Truth
Read Panic coauthor Andrew Redleaf’s thoughts on a financial markets reform that could avert the next catastrophe, published today in the Huffington Post:
There is a financial markets reform that would avert the next financial meltdown, support free-market capitalism, infuriate the mega-banks, (which are far from free-market institutions)and make Sen. Dodd a genuine hero. For decades hence historians would speak of “the Dodd reform” as a turning point in the history of American and perhaps global capitalism.
But he won’t propose it. Neither will the GOP (which is about as genuinely capitalist and devoted to free markets as the mega-banks).
And that means–bizarre as it may seem–the bank-toadying, campaign-contribution-sucking, GOP leadership is right. As it stands, the Dodd bill, like the Frank bill, is worse than useless and deserves to die. Both bills run on flawed assumptions, the most important being that the regulators would have gotten it right if only there had been more of them, if they had known what was going on, if they had more power to stop it, if they hadn’t been ideological free-market types, if they had been appointed by Democrats, or if they hadn’t been divided by interagency turf battles.
The is roughly the opposite of the truth.
