I wesent that wemark.
Posted on 01/26/2009 10:00:29 AM PST by BGHater
Trifecta of names missing from the list, kudos!
Wow, they actually name Bill Clinton and Chris Dodd!
Missed Barney Fwank.
I wesent that wemark.
We're on the same side there, FRiend ... I was only taking issue with that particular sentence in the article.
The Fed has regulatory oversight of some aspects of the banking system, in particular the banks that are members of the Federal Reserve.
The difference between $165,400 and $126,000 is not so great when you realize that it took Dodd neat 20 years to collect that much and Barack Obama less than 4 years to do so.
Barry should have his name added to the list. And his insistence on a bailout which has only seen the market respond with negatives.
Ask Phil Gramm (R-TX). He was the guy who wrote the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which allowed energy and financial futures to be moved outside the regulated futures exchanges that have been around for decades to trade ag commodity futures.
They left out Congress in general, who has the responsibility to oversee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and Barney Frank in particular who did all he could to cover for them.
Yep. No mention of the Banking Queen.
However, I do not believe that the really big players -- Lehman Bros., Bear-Stearns, Goldman-Sachs, and so on -- were not covered by Fed oversight.
Perhaps it's just a difference in emphasis....
It was interesting to see Bill Clinton mentioned by name, finally.
The whole article is a load of crap.
It is meant to bolster the Democrat argument that greedy corporations and eeeevil republicans are to blame.
No mention of the millions of people who couldn’t pay their mortgage.
No mention of Clinton-era measures that enabled these risky loans (enhanced Community Reinvestment act, etc).
No mention of the purposeful misdirection by Frank and Dodd. No mention that Bush attempts to provide more oversight to Fannie/Frddie was blocked by these two.
And no mention that Obama was part of a legal team that forced Citibank to provide loans to risky lenders in Chicago.
I would add to the list of culprits:
- the CEO’s of the monoline insurers
- the quants who created the VaR model
- economists of every stripe up and down Wall Street and in the housing industry
- the National Ass’n of Realtors
And to the list who saw it coming:
- David Einhorn, Greenlight Capital
- Bill Ackman, Pershing Square
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Benoit Mandelbrot
And from quite a remove of time:
- Hyman Minsky
- Irving Fisher
This recent debacle is what I call the first sack of the American public. There was a vast amount of wealth accumulated by the American public post WWII. The politicians seeing the changing demographics and aware of the various ethnic coalitions need the money to buy the votes. The politicians cannot yet actually seize our wealth so they do it indirectly. The pols will now bail out the Third Worlders and we get to thank them.
... and six more who saw it coming
Andrew Lahde
John Paulson, hedge fund boss
Professor Nouriel Roubini
Warren Buffett, billionaire investor
George Soros, speculator
Stephen Eismann, hedge fund manager
Meredith Whitney, Oppenheimer Securities
Correct, the i-banks were outside of Fed regulatory control... BUT, the Fed set an expectation of a safety net when the Fed orchestrated the bailout of LTCM in ‘98.
The Fed could have had one of their “Come to Jesus” meetings at the NY Fed, calling in the heads of the i-banks and laid down the warning “You’re way too levered up, you’re too large for us to backstop you. If you go under, you can take under the US banking system. Therefore, we (the Fed) will be approaching Congress to recommend additional regulation of investment banks.”
The Fed has MANY more tools at their disposal than just the ones enshrined in paper. They have this very broad mandate to assure continued operations of the US banking system, and if the Fed had shown some real leadership (rather than idiotic cheerleading), the Fed could have made such a “unofficial chat” and subsequent recommendations to Congress under their broad mandate for insuring open market operations and banking stability. If the Fed had been ignored (and it is is entirely possible that Frank, Dodd, et al would have stiff-armed Bernanke), then the Fed would at least have had the moral authority to treat the banks with much less courtesy today. The Fed would have been able to say “We did our job. Congress did not. We’re now going to take extraordinary measures...” and so on.
The Fed has extraordinary powers over the banking system, since they are the “bank of last reserve” in addition to a huge repository of research, data, etc. If we had someone other than an academic running the Fed, some things might have been done....
Check out the comments section. People want to blame Thatcher and Reagan!
Even is one is gay that picture has to make you ill.
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