The only Luntz “scandal” is that he is so obviously right
Frank Luntz is a smart guy and a great “messager” but neither skill was required to state the obvious: The Dodd bill like the Frank bill massively reaffirms the status quo: regulators and bankers behind closed doors deciding which bank practices are safe and sound and which are risky and reckless—and getting it wrong as often as right.
The old regulators virtually wrote the script that led to the crash and the bailout. It is reasonable to expect they will do it again. And since bailing out a clutch of megabanks cost almost $1 trillion last time, there’s no way the $50 billion kiddy pool created by the Dem bills will forestall future bailouts.
QED: Luntz is right the Dem bill = more bailouts in the future.
What we would love to see is for Luntz to get behind the one really tough-on-the-banks but pro-market reform the GOP should be going for: No more banking in the dark. Require every bank, every financial institution that manages other people’s money to disclose every investment position, every asset, and every liability not less than once a week, between market close on Friday and market open on Monday morning.
Not accountants’ summaries. The raw data. Every stock, every bond, every long, every short, every hedge, every swap. All of it. Collectively millions and millions of lines of data.
If that data had been public in 2004 the short-sellers of the world would have cut off the worst banks making the worst loans and the mortgage crisis would have been a speed bump.
So let the Dems set up their grand high council of regulatory poo-bahs. We hope it works. But just in case they do again exactly what they did before, let’s back up the poo-bahs with 100 million citizen investors armed with the truth.
We’ve been pushing this idea everywhere: Fox, Barron’s, NRO, the New York Times. But the audience that really needs to hear it is Luntz’s audience: Republican lawmakers who need to be truly and righteously tough on bad banks, while staying true to free market principles.
Go with it Frankie baby, and don’t say we never gave you anything. Add Content…
