Ok, let’s take the Dodd bill point by point, using the summary written by Dodd’s own committee staff.
1)Creates “a strong consumer protection watchdog” which though housed in the Fed will be able to “autonomously write rules for consumer protection.”
Dodd’s justification: “The economic crisis was driven by an across-the-board failure to protect consumers”
Our Take: Imprudent “pro-consumer” [...]
Forget how sleazy this is. How stupid is it than someone with this kind of access is BUYING AIG in January 2008. Just goes to show how hopeless any regulatory solution is. This woman, along with Dodd himself, has privileged access to the best information available to the government. She is chief counsel to the [...]
We think Geithner et al are wrong and that unemployment will decline substantially this year. Both theory and experience argue business investment not consumer spending is the essential driver of recovery. Now that most businesses of significant size can borrow again investments that have been postponed for almost two years now have to come soon.
If [...]
Sorkin has the politics of this exactly right
Arguing over the street address of the consumer financial protection agency makes the GOP look dumb and on the take. (Sort of like real life.) There are really principled and therefor persuasive arguments against a consumer agency, like “consumer protection” in the form of forcing banks to make [...]
The whitewash of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has to be numbered among the most successful spin operations of our time. Within days of the market collapse in September ‘08, both Senator Dodd and Representative Frank were marching stooges up to Capitol Hill to testify that Fannie and Freddie—virtually run by the congressional committees chaired [...]
Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante column that appeared on RealClearMarkets.
Commentary By Capitalism Betrayed’s Redleaf and Vigilante in MarketWatch today:
Forget regulation, just make the banks open their books.
By Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante
MINNEAPOLIS, (MarketWatch) — Sen. Dodd’s new and not-very-improved financial reform bill, like the House bill passed last December, is driven by two of the most cherished popular myths of the financial crisis. [...]
The good side of Soros—and CDS
He’s obnoxious politically but you have to love a guy who has done so much over the years to expose sovereign financial finagling and make money doing it.
Predictably the governments of the world are taking seriously the idea of regulating CDS, now that these lie-detectors of the financial world are [...]
Tamny is always good but this is a great point “a vanilla loan is every bit the speculation that a risky trade is”
The single biggest reason the current proposals for financial reform are all either irrelevant or destructive is that they are based on a faulty premise: the banks got in trouble because they were [...]
How is it that one man can be so wrong, so often, about such obvious things. Here he takes up the mantra that of course we need a consumer financial protection agency. If the banks are not duping the gullible then “ why are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers.” [...]