Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ann Corrigan who wrote (51101)	10/10/2008 8:18:01 PM
From: TideGlider	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224691

What the media and Democrats never tell you: {How Wall Street Bankers bought a President and destroyed the American Economy in ten short years and walked away with TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS!} Over the last 50 years has fallen into the hands of foreign investors. With the US Investment Banks now heavily financed by BILLIONS OF DOLLAR loans -- fueled by oil profits, Wall Street has “morphed” from just being ‘heavily influenced’ by foreign entities to answering to “new owners.” The polls now predict that these ‘New Proprietors’ will, in less than a month, soon own another President – Barack Hussein Obama. While ‘virtually’ all readers of this post will quickly dismiss this information as ‘wild’ imagination and most will not read it at all, the historical facts behind this story are “Rock Solid” and can not be refuted! Rubin calls for modernization through reform of Glass-Steagall Act. Publication: Journal of Accountancy Date: Monday, May 1 1995 {Destruction of America and the American economy began when Wall Street banks bought themselves a President – weeks after Glass Steagall was overturned by the Clinton Administration, the Mastermind Robert E. Rubin Robert E. Rubin, secretary of the Treasury, recommended that Congress pass legislation to reform or repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 to modernize the country's financial system. In testimony before the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services, Rubin said Clinton administration proposals would permit affiliations between banks and other financial services companies, such as securities firms and insurance companies. However, the secretary emphasized that the Clinton administration did not endorse affiliations between banks and industrial companies. The Glass-Steagall Act was enacted during the Great Depression to restrict the securities activities and affiliations of banks and has long been seen as having separated commercial banking. The act was intended to protect banks, prevent conflicts of interest and other abuses and safeguard the financial system. Rubin said supporters of the act today say Glass-Steagall is necessary to protect the federal deposit insurance system. "However," said Rubin, "the banking industry is fundamentally different from what it was two decades ago, let alone in 1933." He said the industry has been transformed into a global business of facilitating capital formation through diverse new products, services and markets. "U.S. banks generally engage in a broader range of securities activities abroad than is permitted domestically," said the Treasury secretary. "Even domestically, the separation of investment banking and commercial banking envisioned by Glass-Steagall has eroded significantly." Robert E. Rubin, secretary of the Treasury, recommended that Congress pass legislation to reform or repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 to modernize the country's financial system. In testimony before the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services, Rubin said Clinton administration proposals would permit affiliations between banks and other financial services companies, such as securities firms and insurance companies. However, the secretary emphasized that the Clinton administration did not endorse affiliations between banks and industrial companies. The Glass-Steagall Act was enacted during the Great Depression to restrict the securities activities and affiliations of banks and has long been seen as having separated commercial banking. The act was intended to protect banks, prevent conflicts of interest and other abuses and safeguard the financial system. Rubin said supporters of the act today say Glass-Steagall is necessary to protect the federal deposit insurance system. "However," said Rubin, "the banking industry is fundamentally different from what it was two decades ago, let alone in 1933." He said the industry has been transformed into a global business of facilitating capital formation through diverse new products, services and markets. "U.S. banks generally engage in a broader range of securities activities abroad than is permitted domestically," said the Treasury secretary. "Even domestically, the separation of investment banking and commercial banking envisioned by Glass-Steagall has eroded significantly." Rubin said Glass-Steagall imposed unnecessary costs and made providing financial services less efficient and more costly. He said the act can "conceivably impede safety and soundness by limiting revenue diversification." Rubin also said many legitimate concerns were addressed adequately outside the act, including the numerous steps taken to safeguard against risky and abusive bank transactions and to protect the deposit insurance fund. Among Rubin's recommendations for financial modernization were * Permitting a depository institution insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to affiliate with a securities firm, insurance company or other financial company. * Repealing section 20 of the Glass-Steagall Act. Section 20 prohibits a bank that is a federal reserve system member from affiliating with a company principally engaged in underwriting or dealing in securities that a national bank cannot underwrite or deal in directly. * Allowing insured depository institutions to affiliate only with firms that were well capitalized and well managed and had internal controls that adequately managed financial and operational risk, and only if the institutions' safety and soundness were unimpaired. * Maintaining the Federal Reserve Board's authority to impose consolidated capital standards as a safeguard on bank holding companies whose subsidiary insured depository institutions constitute their principal business. Rubin said bills introduced in the House and the Senate to modernize the financial services system were highly constructive, although somewhat different from the Clinton administration's recommendations, and that a bipartisan effort could yield significant results this year Rubin with helping create the conditions for the Financial crisis of 2007–2008, as a result of the policies he pursued as Treasury Secretary. Together with then-Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, Rubin strongly opposed the regulation of derivatives, when such regulation was proposed by then-head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Brooksley Born. Over-exposure to credit derivatives of mortgage-backed securities - or credit default swaps (CDS) was a key reason for the failure of US financial insitutions Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, American International Group, and Washington Mutual in 2008. In 1999, affirming his career-long interest in markets, Mr. Rubin joined Citigroup. Of note, the supermerger between Travelers Group and Citicorp was facilitated by the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act. {Written in 1995}

To: Ann Corrigan who wrote (51101)	10/11/2008 3:45:53 AM
From: nigel bates	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224691

I'm afraid you candidate will disappoint you there. He has seen the abyss and is stepping back from it. youtube.com

To: Ann Corrigan who wrote (51101)	10/11/2008 8:35:03 AM
From: cirrus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224691

More likely McCain will avoid the issue because it could very well backfire. I know you won't agree, but Obama can make a compelling case that: 1) He was eight when Ayers was tossing bombs some forty some years ago. 2) Ayers has been a respected figure in the Chicago educational and political scene in the many years since his Weatherman days. Don't get all riled up at me about this - take it up with someone from Chicago. 3) His relationship with Ayers was incidental. Hillary and just about everyone else interested in Ayers turned heaven and earth to find something more concrete but couldn't. Just saying there is or must be doesn't cut it. Good luck. 4) They served on a board supervising the Annenberg Project. What's a firebombing radical doing on the board of an organization founded by a Regan Republican? 5) If we're going to look at judgement, lets talk about that Keating guy and the S&L mess... The right hounded the Clintons for years, claiming there was so much so more to Whitewater that Clinton was hiding. They wound up spending years and $100 million of taxpayer dollars investigating Whitewater and ended up with nothing more than semen on a dress. Now they're starting this stuff with, as McCain himself described Ayers, "a washed up old terrorist" - claiming that Obama is, like Clinton, hiding something - but they can't say what. The right is crying "Wolf!" again. USA TODAY suggested Monday that we stipulate that a) Obama is not a terrorist and b) McCain is not crook - and move on.

To: Ann Corrigan who wrote (51101)	10/11/2008 8:51:17 AM
From: cirrus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224691

Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, is backing Obama. (CNN) — No, hell has not frozen over, but a Buckley is backing a Democrat for president. Christopher Buckley, the son of the late conservative icon William F. Buckley, said Friday he's decided to back Barack Obama's White House bid, the first time in his life he will vote Democrat. “It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup [sic] are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance," Buckley, a columnist for the conservative National Review, wrote on the Web site The Daily Beast Friday. Buckley, who praised McCain in a New York Times Op-Ed earlier this year and defended the Arizona senator's conservative credentials against wary talk-radio hosts, said McCain is no longer the “real” and “unconventional” man he once admired. "This campaign has changed John McCain," Buckley wrote. "It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget 'by the end of my first term.' Who, really, believes that? "Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis," Buckley added. "His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?" But Buckley made clear he's not just voting against McCain, praising Obama for his "first-class temperament and first-class intellect." "Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy 'We are the people we have been waiting for' silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for," Buckley wrote. politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com Posted: 11:08 PM ET From CNN Ticker Producer Alexander Mooney