Am I looking at something the wrong way or is this basically not the guy I’d want in charge of regulating banks??
It is so corrupt that it is unimaginable.
Dems want to blame for political reasons, but make the banks pay! and defend HUD, Fannie/Freddie at all costs.
Repubs will defend the banks at all costs.
Both are corrupt and both will destroy us.
The classical understanding, in the founders day, was that “to regulate” meant to “regularize”: to make standards that served to level the playing field - everyone plays by the same rules - and help prevent negligence and fraud.
It did not mean to simply criminalize any particular business practice just because a politician thought the practice was “unfair”; in as much as individuals do not lose the right of contracts, permitting anyone the liberty to NOT enter into a contract they believe is “unfair” to themselves. That is why helping to obtain transparency - full knowledge of the facts in a financial transaction - are also part of “to regularize”; but transparency itself is meant to “shine a light” on what is taking place and not necessarily criminalizing something.
That said, it cannot be said that “regulators” did their jobs, in the run up to the “financial crisis” of 2008.
However, any regulatory error that they made DID NOT REQUIRE any new legislation, or any new powers for them to have insisted on different standards than what prevailed up to 2008. For the most part, they simply needed to act differently than they did, within the powers that they already had.
And guess what, the “financial reform” legislation of 2009 is not very specific on exactly what the new standards ought to be either. The majority of what that bill did was not in detailing new standards, but in INCREASING the depth, breadth, reach and minutia of new federal power to regulate nearly every “financial transaction” imaginable (not just banks and not just “financial” institutions - but “financial transactions” (any and every possible “consumer contract” or transaction between anyone, individual or corporate), and empowering new federal dictators to dictate what the details of their own new “standards” will be.
When it is clear what the true purpose and true objective of the Dims 2009 federal legislation really was - increasing the depth, breadth and reach of federal power (with the excuse of the “financial crisis” as the reason); then you understand where Bachus could be coming from; when he is concerned about “regulation” becoming too involved in to much “minutia”.
The worst part of the 2009 "financial reform" legislation is that it insures that banks now know that in the next "crisis" that they help create, some of them automatically don't have to worry, because the law mandates that regulators will chose who has to be "bailed out" and that they carry it out - at our expense. It - the law - insures there will be a next time, because "too big to fail" is not only accepted, it is institutionalized, by law. And next, time, the "regulators" don't have to ask Congress how much the "regulators" can put us all on the hook for any new bailouts - they now have authority to do so on their own. What we needed was the opposite message to all the banks - no one is "too big to fail", and the only ones we will ever help out is the depositors with FDIC insured accounts - not the bank corporations, not their bondholders, not their stock holders. With THAT kind of notice, sheer self preservation would change their behavior.
