White House:
Here are a few highlights:

* There's now a single agency responsible for looking out for consumers: the Bureau for Consumer Financial Protections. Instead of seven agencies dealing with these issues part-time, one agency will be in charge of establishing clear rules of the road for banks, mortgage companies, payday lenders and credit card lenders.
* Mortgage brokers won't make a higher commission by selling people mortgages that they can't afford. This was a major factor in the recent housing crisis. Now brokers and banks have to take into consideration a borrower's ability to repay before giving a home loan.
* You’ll be able to get a free credit score if you’re denied a loan, an apartment, or a job because of your credit, so you won’t be turned down without knowing why. Right now, you get one free credit report a year, but you can’t see your credit score for free, even if a lender or employer rejects your application because you have bad credit.
* No more bailing out banks with our tax dollars, no more "too big to fail." If a company's in trouble because of risky gambles, it will have to liquidate -- and do so before it can take down the rest of the financial system.

It's all about credit unions.

Verrrrry interestrating.

Here's their Top 10 Things You May Not Know About the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

BTW, the campaign e-mail I got related to this was addressed as being from Joe Biden, and had the subject line "Another Big Deal".

Nice touch, that.

I'm probably the only person here that smells insidious propaganda. Especially since in this propaganda piece the blame only falls on the banks.

I'm NOT defending the banks, but this smacks of revisionist history, because no one is talking about manipulated interest rates, housing subsidies, and propping up the housing industry influenced the bubble inflation and bursting.

This is what scares me about Obama. Because he's president now, he is incapable of making any substantial critique of the government's failings in our economy. Sure, he may point the finger at Bush, which is an easy target, but never do you hear anyone from his administration discuss the failures of the Federal Reserve's egregious financial dick-fingering and the Keynesian model altogether.

>> ^blankfist:

I'm probably the only person here that smells insidious propaganda. Especially since in this propaganda piece the blame only falls on the banks.
I'm NOT defending the banks, but this smacks of revisionist history, because no one is talking about manipulated interest rates, housing subsidies, and propping up the housing industry influenced the bubble inflation and bursting.
This is what scares me about Obama. Because he's president now, he is incapable of making any substantial critique of the government's failings in our economy. Sure, he may point the finger at Bush, which is an easy target, but never do you hear anyone from his administration discuss the failures of the Federal Reserve's egregious financial dick-fingering and the Keynesian model altogether.

Somebody's been reading wikipedia

@rottenseed. Haha. I take that as a jab at my rushed writing. "Dick-fingering" is a good expression, though. Not eloquent, but effective.

You won't hear complaints about the Keynesian model because he is a Keynesian. He's never pretended to be anything else.

I agree that this is propaganda however. This bill won't prevent the next bubble, it almost certainly won't stop too big to fail, and it probably won't prevent the next tax payer funded bailout. Honestly, it's anemic. It doesn't even address credit default swaps.

The Volker rule is interesting, but it isn't clear to me how it will be applied. I mean, banks have clients betting on one side or another of just about every possible transaction. I guess, the idea is that banks can longer engage in proprietary trading at all. The thing is, then all the banks will go belly up because nobody will actually keep their money with them. People will go chasing the higher returns just like they did before. The banks will start clamoring about relaxing the rules just like they did before. Finally, we'll end up mired in the same shit we are now.

Being a Keynesian is great and all, it's just they need to draft some legislation with a little more nut.

"...banks have clients betting on one side or another of just about every possible transaction."

And that's the problem with Wall Street and our entire system in a nutshell.

People are "betting" with their money.

They are not "investing" it into anything tangible or long-term.

http://videosift.com/video/Obama-Turns-Consumer-Financial-Protection-Over-To-The-Banks

The left, of course, will deem this legislation as "toothless" but its harmful "unintended consequences", that hallmark of all new legislation, are easily predictable: increasing paperwork, handing more power to bureaucrats, further burdening the ailing economy with onerous regulations while doing nothing to punish anyone except the taxpayer and consumer (aka you and me).

keynes was wrong. and remains wrong.

fuck this video fuck it fuck it all. banks didn't have to be bailed out, this reform bill isn't anything like this video. downvote. not personal fisk.

i thought i had a good link on the financial reform bill, but i lost it.
heres one on the economic crash
http://on.wsj.com/dgWxnJ
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/les-leopold/fear-and-looting-in-ameri_b_209552.html

Two sides to a coin....

http://videosift.com/video/Gerald-Celente-This-isn-t-reform-its-depression

>> ^blankfist:

I'm NOT defending the banks, but this smacks of revisionist history, because no one is talking about manipulated interest rates, housing subsidies, and propping up the housing industry influenced the bubble inflation and bursting.

Revisionist history would be declaring that the economic crisis was caused by interest rates, housing subsidies, or "propping up" the housing industry, and not about a bunch of greedy banks building themselves a de facto ponzi scheme.

>> ^blankfist:
This is what scares me about Obama. Because he's president now, he is incapable of making any substantial critique of the government's failings in our economy. Sure, he may point the finger at Bush, which is an easy target, but never do you hear anyone from his administration discuss the failures of the Federal Reserve's egregious financial dick-fingering and the Keynesian model altogether.


You know why you don't? Because a) nothing about this crisis disproves anything about New Keynesian economics, and b) because apparently you consider criticism about how regulators didn't enforce the laws on the books to not be criticism.

This is really well done. I wish I could invoke *quality, but my status as a subprime sifter denies it.

Invocations (quality) cannot be called by TheJMan because TheJMan is not privileged - sorry.

The bank was too big to fail, so we didn't do anything about that. Oops.

That sounds distinctly like Kal Penn narrating.

/edit
Oh, this was released by the Gov. it probably really is him.

>> ^GDGD:

That sounds distinctly like Kal Penn narrating.
/edit
Oh, this was released by the Gov. it probably really is him.


I knew this voice sounded like some celebrity, but I couldn't put my finger on who it was. It almost certainly is Kal Penn.

>> ^blankfist:

I'm probably the only person here that smells insidious propaganda.


What part of the White House press release description gave you such omniscient powers?

>> ^NetRunner:

Revisionist history would be declaring that the economic crisis was caused by interest rates, housing subsidies, or "propping up" the housing industry, and not about a bunch of greedy banks building themselves a de facto ponzi scheme.

You know why you don't? Because a) nothing about this crisis disproves anything about New Keynesian economics, and b) because apparently you consider criticism about how regulators didn't enforce the laws on the books to not be criticism.


It can't be the fault of the banks AND the bad policies of the Federal Government and the Federal Reserve? Then, you sir, lose. Good day.

>> ^blankfist:

It can't be the fault of the banks AND the bad policies of the Federal Government and the Federal Reserve? Then, you sir, lose. Good day.


Sure it can, it just wasn't any of the specific things you listed, which is why "nobody" is talking about them.

Mostly the problem was that the SEC and the FRB weren't enforcing the regulations they were tasked with regulating, because the highly-ideological political appointees at the top of both believed that the invisible hand of the market would lead banks to regulate themselves.

Alan Greenspan admitted later that he was wrong to think that.

@NetRunner. Nobody is talking about it? Not true. Nobody from the current Administration probably, but to say the housing bubble and manipulation of interest rates had nothing to do with the current recession is absolute nonsense.

Also, you show me the invisible hand of market. I've not seen a free market in the US in my lifetime and neither have you. Corporate charters and the "lender of last resort" central banking system are not representative of open markets.

>> ^blankfist:

@NetRunner. Nobody is talking about it? Not true. Nobody from the current Administration probably, but to say the housing bubble and manipulation of interest rates had nothing to do with the current recession is absolute nonsense.

First, "manipulated interest rates" is meaningless nonsense. If you mean the Fed setting short-term interest rates through open market operations, apparently depressions have been permanent since it started doing that in 1913. No? Well, maybe before that they must have never happened. No, actually they did, and with far greater frequency than 2 per century.

Second, of course the housing bubble has to do with the current recession, but what's absolute nonsense is the idea that the housing bubble of the 2000s was caused by long standing housing subsidies is absurd. Just look at the price of housing and un-subsidized commercial real estate on a single chart. Hey, those look like they both turned into bubbles!

>> ^blankfist:
Also, you show me the invisible hand of market. I've not seen a free market in the US in my lifetime and neither have you. Corporate charters and the "lender of last resort" central banking system are not representative of open markets.


And this is the real nonsense behind all of your beliefs. By this logic, you should also conclude that you can't blame liberalism for anything that goes wrong now or in the past, because we've never brought our ideal system into play in America, so you don't know what life under liberalism would really be like.

The combination of fractional reserve banking, the Federal Reserve Act, Legal Tender law, and supply-side economics are all you need to know about to know why all this has occurred. The standard Left/Right arguments about the economy are pointless. Nothing will change permanently until we change the system.

Problem is, you don't find too many Americans willing to give up our economic and cultural hegemony in favor of a sustainable monetary system. So, we'll continue to gobble every resource and create as much debt as we can until it backfires.

All these bills, arguments, etc, are akin to fighting over whether to steer the boat towards the left or the right side of the river...only neither side seems to notice or care about the waterfall...they only care about being the biggest and prettiest boat in the race.

@NetRunner. Straw man arguments FTW!

>> ^blankfist:

@NetRunner. Straw man arguments FTW!


Oh for Christ's sake. Make an actual argument then, and stop throwing out baseless, meaningless comments.