Tighten Up
Mar 23rd, 2008 at 8:45 am by Susie
One would hope Congress has learned the lesson of this market crash - namely, that when you let the market run rampant, it’s a disaster. Of course, the market enablers will fight it every step of the way:
“You need regulation that is adequate to the scope of innovation and to the scope of activity,” said Representative Barney Frank, the Democrat of Massachusetts who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.
Mr. Frank said last week that Congress should consider creating a new regulator — or giving the Federal Reserve greater powers — to oversee all financial markets and intervene when necessary.
Mr. Frank, saying that government had failed to keep up with the explosion of new financial instruments, said regulators needed to re-examine capital reserves, risk-management practices and consumer protection without regard to whether companies were commercial banks, investment banks or nonbank mortgage lenders.
“You do it right, and it’s pro-market,” Mr. Frank said in an interview. “Right now, we have an investors’ strike going on, and restoring investor confidence is a top priority.”
But industry groups warn that heavy-handed regulation could dry up investment capital just when the economy needs it most.
“If we don’t tread very carefully on restructuring a very complex financial system, we might stifle the necessary animal instincts of a free market,” said Mark A. Bloomfield, president of the American Council for Capital Formation, a business advocacy group. “Every day, the cries of populism grow stronger and could trample good economic policy.”
Oh, boo fucking hoo. We’ll be mired in the droppings of their “animal instincts” for decades to come.
As to Barney Frank’s solution: new regulations are useless to fraudulent if there is no intent to enforce. “No regulatory enforcement” is policy in the Bush Administration and I suspect it will get no better under the next corporate suck-up elected to the office. As to Bloomfield, “necessary animal instincts”? The rest of the animal world in general is far more moral than free market predators who only wish for the market to be “free” while they are winning (although they continue to lobby for rule changes which help them “win” more) and then scream for and get bailouts when they are losing. A plague on all their houses.
Um, how does populism equate with no free market? It would seem that populism actually embodies the real free market by not subsidizing and protecting a wealthy corporate oligarchy at the expense of everyone else.
Now. Maybe Mr. Bloomfield has something. I know my ‘animal instincts’ are really stoked at the moment to tear the throat out of the “sound economic policy” that has ruined our nation.