McCain promises to bring era of reform to Washington

McCain promises to bring era of reform to Washington

All the fine rhetoric about change from either political camp is just an entertainment circus a vote buying exercise on how to continue government and maintain prosperity with deficit spending .Both camps promise tax cuts to different eager pigs and the military industrial complex either for profits or jobs in order To feed at the trough.Each camps promises to solve the deficit problem and somehow get the economy functioning again.But the US under globalism has used its dollar hegonomy to live on foreign credit for cheap labour credit.But the wheels have fallen off the shopping mall economy .Manufacturing only survives on military related cost plus subsidies or has gone to thev third world . Investing in US property mortgages Eg freddy and fanny and the construction industry is a losing oportunity for foreign inverstors as asset values continue to fall . America could only continue as long as it had a foreign credit supply.

Re-regulation still not there yet...
:mad:
Financial reform far from done deal
Tuesday, Apr. 06, 2010 - It’s funny how fast the Beltway consensus can change. A few months ago, health care reform was dead. Then it got undead. Financial regulatory reform was supposedly dead too, but now that Republicans have supposedly learned that pure obstructionism is a losing play, it’s being treated as a done deal. Democrats like Obama’s economic adviser Larry Summers and Senate Banking Committee chairman Christopher Dodd are saying it’s going to pass, perhaps as early as next month. So are key Republicans like Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, who recently put the odds of passage at “100%.“

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Let’s just say that seems high. It is conceivable that a new wave of bipartisan cooperation will sweep financial reform into law â�� even though the House version passed last year with zero Republican votes; even though Dodd’s version passed through committee last month with, yes, zero Republican votes; even though Big Finance is blasting boatloads of money around Washington to block reform. It’s at least plausible, as I’ve written, that if President Obama succeeds at framing reform as a stark banks-vs.-people choice, and enough Republicans get nervous about the political price they might pay for siding with Wall Street, a deal could be cut to get the issue out of the news before November. And the most recent behavior of Republicans â�� their hopeful rhetoric about reform, their sudden openness to concessions on the consumer financial-protection agency they’ve been bashing for months â�� is consistent with a desire to cave rather than fight.

Yet their behavior is also consistent with a desire to appear reasonable, maintain the illusion of good-faith negotiations and insulate themselves from charges of carrying the industry’s water when the negotiations fall apart. We saw this movie during health care. And if you focus on the fundamentals â�� political and substantive â�� instead of the latest Washington kabuki, the path to passage is a lot harder to envision than the path to oh-well-maybe-next-year. Start with the calendar. Financial reform still needs to get through the full Senate. Then the House and Senate would have to work out a compromise bill, which would have to get through the House and Senate again, which would mean ample opportunities for filibusters and other delays. And the window for bipartisan cooperation â�� never a particularly large window â�� gets smaller every day. “Time is not the friend of reform," an Administration official told me in January. “This won’t get done after everyone goes home to campaign in August."

Of course, a deal could happen before August if everyone really wanted one. But that is not the case.

More [url:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1977987,00.html?cnn=yes&hpt=Sbin[/url]

See also:

Obama-Backed Financial Reform Bill Would Create New Bureaucracy with Power to Subpoena �Any Data� from �Any Financial Company�
Tuesday, April 06, 2010 - The financial regulatory bill, which passed the Senate Banking Committee on March 22 with President Barack Obama�s backing and is now a top priority for congressional Democrats, would create a new Treasury Department bureaucracy authorized to collect any and all information from �any financial company� to ****yze whether financial firms and their business practices might threaten financial stability.

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The new bureaucracy would have subpoena power. Called the Office of Financial Research, it would be the brains behind the proposed Financial Stability Oversight Council, a nine-member board that would be responsible for monitoring the entire �financial services marketplace� for threats to financial stability and for recommending to the appropriate federal financial agencies what new regulations they may need to write.

�The Council may request the submission of any data or information from the Office of Financial Research and member agencies, as necessary� (A) to monitor the financial services marketplace to identify potential risks to the financial stability of the United States,� the bill states. In order to do this, the bill creates the Office of Financial Research to collect any and all data the Council thinks it needs to adequately monitor the entire financial services industry.

�The Office may, on behalf of the Council, require the submission of periodic and other reports from any financial company for the purpose of assessing the extent to which a financial activity or financial market in which the financial company participates, or the financial company itself, poses a threat to the financial stability of the United States,� says the bill. If a financial company does not comply with an order from the Office of Financial Research, the office will be authorized to issue a subpoena to get information it believes it needs.

�The Director may require, by subpoena, the production of the data requested,� the bill says.

More [url:
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/63756[/url]

Sometimes I wonder if some o' this ball-dropping is intentional?...
:confused:
Congress Drops the Ball on Ratings Agency Reform
Friday, April 23, 2010 - Today the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a hearing on the role credit ratings agencies played in the financial crisis.

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These are the companies that gave high marks to securitization deals, like the one Goldman Sachs is currently being sued over, even though the underlying collateralâ��namely, home loansâ��was pretty much crap. As today’s hearing illustrated, the ratings process became particularly corrupt in recent years, as companies like S&P and Moody’s slapped AAA lipstick on collateralized debt pigs, bending standards to keep the investment banks doing these deals happy and profits gushing in the door.

In today’s hearing, Eric Kolchinsky, a former team managing director at Moody’s, said he considered what had taken placeâ��that is, what he saw go on first handâ��to be securities fraud. Another witness, former Moody’s vice president Richard Michalek, explained the term IBGYBG. “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone," he said. “That thinking was driving what was going on." Make your money, then get out before the whole thing blows. The good news is that Congress addresses credit ratings companies in the financial reform legislation it is currently working to pass. The bad news is that what’s in both the House and Senate bills does practically nothing to take on the true, underlying problem.

That problem is this: the people who pay for ratings are the ones selling the stuff getting rated. A purer conflict of interest would be hard to find. This “issuer pay” model has been taken to task in the past. For example, despite plenty of warning signs, the major ratings companies all kept investment-grade ratings on Enron until just days before it declared bankruptcy. In the most recent go-round, this conflict reached epic proportions, with ****ysts being pressured on a daily basis to rate mortgage-related securitizations highly, lest the banks creating them decide to take their business elsewhere. Bonuses were directly tied to firms' share of the securitization-rating market.

[url=http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2010/04/23/congress-drops-the-ball-on-ratings-agency-reform/?xid=rss-topstories:
MORE[/url]

See also:

How credit watchdogs fueled the financial crisis
April 23, 2010 — As the real estate market came crashing down, widespread packaging of toxic mortgages into complex financial products, blessed by credit rating agencies, caused the crisis to spread to the larger economy.

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That’s the subject of an 18-month investigation by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Senator Carl Levin, examining the causes of the financial crisis. Complicated portfolios made up of subprime mortgages, known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, received the stamp of approval from rating agencies, but turned out to be a contagion that wreaked havoc on the global economy.

Lawmakers are now asserting that credit rating agencies (CRAs) like Moody’s Investors Service and Standard and Poor’s Ratings Services failed to expose the lurking dangers. “Rating agencies continue to create an even bigger monster - the CDO Market," wrote one S&P employee in an internal e-mail in December of 2006. “Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters."

The e-mail and other documents were presented as evidence at a hearing on Capitol Hill Friday, during which executives from Moody’s and S&P testified. The Subcommittee is accusing the credit agencies of contributing to the crisis in several major ways: By using ineffective models to measure risk, by inflating ratings because of pressure from banks, by ignoring early warning signs and by failing to quickly disclose the risk on existing products once it was discovered.

[url=http://money.cnn.com/2010/04/23/news/economy/credit_rating_agencies_hearing/index.htm:
Lousy modeling[/url]

Since when did GE become part of Congress...
:confused:
GE wants to amend financial reform bill
May 17, 2010 — General Electric said it was rallying allies to amend the financial reform bill to exclude U.S. manufacturers from oversight historically reserved for banks.

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The 1,400-page reform bill in debate in the Senate would form a council of regulators charged with identifying companies so big that their failure would ripple through the entire financial system.

If the council saw a failure of a company was likely, it could be charged with steering it toward liquidation or, in the case of financial firms, it could direct a regulatory agency, like the Federal Reserve, to mandate the firm put more capital in reserve to protect investors or clients against losses, The Washington Post reported Monday.

GE, which lends billions of dollars to consumers each year through a subsidiary, wants to have companies that are primarily manufacturers exempted. “This is a “Save GE' kind of amendment," said Raj Date, executive director of the Cambridge Winter Center for Financial Institutions Policy.

The amendment is one that would protect profits at companies like Harley-Davidson, Caterpillar and John Deere, but put economic stability at risk, said Heather McGhee, director of the Washington office of Demos, a think tank. “We don’t want to have another financial crisis because a last-minute amendment unwound the entire regulatory framework," she said.

[url=http://www.upi.com/Business_News/2010/05/17/GE-wants-to-amend-financial-reform-bill/UPI-94031274120788/:
Source[/url]

For that matter when did Goldmann Sachs?

How can McCain bring any change when the same people have financed him?

waltky;203197:
Since when did GE become part of Congress...
:confused:
GE wants to amend financial reform bill
May 17, 2010 — General Electric said it was rallying allies to amend the financial reform bill to exclude U.S. manufacturers from oversight historically reserved for banks.

Why is the Federal Reserve a private bank allowed to print unlimited amounts of money?
Why are it’s leaders allowed to go in front of COngress and refuse to answer specific questions?

Where did two trillion of your money go? Hank Paulson says “Trust us”
Mon, 11/10/2008 - 12:12pm � lambert

You know the old joke about how “Trust me” translates to "**** you”? It seems like Hank Paulson thinks it’s funny, too. Bloomberg:

The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. ...

Two months later, as the Fed lends far more than that in separate rescue programs that didn’t require approval by Congress, Americans have no idea where their money is going or what securities the banks are pledging in return.

Wait a minute. Two trillion? I thought it was one trillion. Now it’s two? Pretty soon we’re going to be talking real money here!

The Fed made the loans under terms of 11 programs, eight of them created in the past 15 months, in the midst of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

The Fed’s lending is significant because the central bank has stepped into a rescue role that was also the purpose of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, bailout plan — without safeguards put into the TARP legislation by Congress.

And if you’re asking for trust, it’s not a wise strategy to start out by lying:

``We need oversight,'' Paulson told lawmakers. ``We need protection. We need transparency. I want it. We all want it.'' ....

Look, I’d just hate to think that the Bush + Reid + Pelosi + Obama + Paulson bailout bill turned out to be a slush fund for Big Money, but Occam’s razor makes it pretty hard to avoid any other conclusion.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg — the press, God save us — is doing the right thing:

Bloomberg News has requested details of the Fed lending under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and filed a federal lawsuit Nov. 7 seeking to force disclosure.

Good for Bloomberg. It would be nice to see a sternly worded letter from the Dems on this. Instead, we get this from Barney Frank:

Frank said the Fed shouldn’t reveal the assets it holds or how it values them because of ``delicacy with respect to pricing.'' He said such disclosure would ``give people clues to what your pricing is and what they might be able to sell us and what your estimates are.'' He wouldn’t say why he thought that information would be problematic.

I can’t imagine why. Can you?

We’re a year into this thing and still nobody knows how big the Big ****pile is.

Why is that? Is the whole Village going naked? I don’t go to the doctor because I have no way to pay for what the doctor may find. So why go? Why isn’t the Village getting a diagnosis on the Big ****pile? Are they not getting the diagnosis because they can’t pay for the treatment?

Could we have some leadership on this please? Maybe even some “hope” or “change”?

Because somehow I think the upcoming “economic stimulus package” isn’t going to help this at all.


The joke is on the people of the world!
Using this tarp and omnibus money the banksters are setting up a scientific dictatorship controlled by the worlds oligarchs who will turn all they can into little more then serfs!

Watch this trailor to see Hank Paulson tell the US Congress no I won’t tell you where the money went!

www.obamadeception.net

Uncle Mitch gonna make `em do it right...
:cool:
Senate Fails To End Debate On Bank Regulation Bill
WASHINGTON May 19, 2010, Senate Republicans on Wednesday delayed final action on a sweeping financial regulation bill, raising an obstacle to the legislation as it approached the home stretch.

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The vote was 57-42, three votes shy of the 60 needed to pass. Three Democrats joined 39 Republicans in voting against the measure. Among them was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who switched his vote from yes for procedural reasons. Reid said he’d seek a new vote Thursday. With Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., absent, Democrats needed one more vote to demonstrate to Republicans that they would eventually prevail and set the stage to pass the biggest rewrite of financial regulations since the Great Depression.

The legislation would set up a mechanism to watch out for risks in the financial system, create a method to liquidate large failing firms and write new rules for complex securities blamed for helping precipitate the 2008 economic crisis. It also would create a new consumer protection agency, a key point for President Barack Obama. Republicans this week have escalated their attacks on the legislation, arguing the bill had grown worse and did not address root causes of the 2008 financial meltdown.

The Democratic majority, said Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, “uses this crisis as yet another opportunity to expand the cost and size and reach of government." While the bill appears ultimately headed for final passage, Wednesday’s vote put the end game in question, including the fate of several contentious amendments that remained unresolved. Among them was a measure that would allow states to impose their interest rate caps on financial institutions that issue credit cards. Currently, banks and credit card companies are only required to charge the interest rate permitted in the state where they are headquartered.

More [url:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122793558[/url]