Both parties deserve credit for hosing up the banking, credit and financial markets. Mother Jones has a very nice timeline that shows all the changes made to our laws and regulations, starting with of course the 1913 Federal Reserve Act which created our national banking system. The timeline points fingers at the executive branch and the congress critter that wrote the bills and/or regulations that slowly put us into this very large shithole we find our nation in now.
Nomi Prins, a former Wall Streeter who worked for Bear Stearns, has her take on wtf went down here. Ms. Prins lays the blame at many feet, among them:
Newt Gingrich. The 1994 Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act was the birth of the sub-prime lending. I have never liked Newt, and in many ways he reminds me of Weathervane McCain.
Phil the fuckwit Gramm and his infamous Enron Loophole within the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 . Need I say more?
The failure of Congress to pass the Predatory Lending Consumer Protection Act of 2001.
Pointing fingers now will only serve to show us where not to go from here on out. I am not a financial guru and have never claimed to be, but it isn’t rocket science to say what and who screwed the pooch.
MoJo has a piece up by James Ridgeway entitled; How to fix it, take the Fed Public. In it he says the following, which some might construe as gasp…socialism!!! :
What form could a Fed overhaul take-if Congress and the next president had the guts to do it? One option would be to make the bank part of the Treasury Department, a scheme that has been floated by various economists. Under such a plan, the Fed would be subject to congressional oversight and the heads of the regional Federal Reserve banks-who wield considerable power through the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets key interest rates-would become government appointees as well.
A move to Treasury, points out William Greider, author of Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, would place the body that functions as the fulcrum of the national economy firmly within the constitutional system of checks and balances. “The grand bargain that ought to be pursued is more leverage for more accountability,” says Financial Markets Center founder Tom Schlesinger.
As a socialist-minded progressive, I don’t mind this idea one damn bit. Ridgeways piece is short but chock full of interesting information. I still say its quite simple….if you socialize the losses, so too should the profits go back into the Federal ‘kitty’. Fuck those free market sons of bitches.
