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Politics : Technical Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: slowmo who wrote (5525)	4/4/2013 12:12:30 PM
From: PulpCutter	Respond to of 14245

Which corrupt companies do you mean? If you mean the TBTF banks, that was clearly led by the GOP, and continues to be. The GOP has been fighting banking regulation tooth and nail, for their fat campaign contributions from WallSt. marketwatch.com Before Boehner, ABA President Edward Yingling told bankers that the longer that the Senate lawmakers can't come to an agreement on the bank-reform bill, the more leverage Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., the banking committee's ranking member, has to prompt concessions. "Every day that passes gives more leverage to Shelby," Yingling told bankers. nationofchange.org SEC chief Schapiro echoed the point: “We’ve been asked to take on very significant new responsibilities,” she said. Though the SEC has made progress in hiring new staffers and improving its technological capabilities, Schapiro conceded that, in some areas, the efforts haven’t gone far enough. Adequately funding the CFTC and SEC is imperative to successfully implementing new regulations and policing Wall Street. Republicans oppose those efforts and have repeatedly pushed for cuts to the agencies’ budgets. “ The less we fund those agencies,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said last June, “the better America will be.” The SEC is funded by fees paid by banks, not by taxpayers, so cuts to its budget won’t affect the federal deficit. But it is prohibited from collecting more in fees than it is allocated in the budget, so the $225 million cut Republicans pushed last year amounts to a massive giveaway to Wall Street, which will save exactly that amount. baselinescenario.com During the Dodd-Frank financial reform debate in early 2010, newly elected Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts was referred to as an ATM for the bankers – meaning that whenever they needed some more cash, they would stop by his office. It was not paper money he was handing out, of course, it was something much more valuable – rule changes that conferred a greater ability to take on reckless risk, damage consumers, and impose higher future costs on the taxpayer. Mr. Brown had this ability because he represented the final vote needed to pass Dodd-Frank through the Senate. He could have asked for many things – including greater consumer protection, a more thorough investigation into mortgage practices, and reforms that would have cleaned up unscrupulous lenders. He asked for none of those changes – or anything else that would have made the financial system safer and fairer. Instead, Senator Brown’s requests were designed to undermine the Volcker Rule – i.e., he was opposing sensible attempts to limit the ability of big banks to place highly dangerous bets (and to blow themselves up at great cost to the rest of us). Mr. Brown seems to have been particularly keen to allow big banks to invest in hedge funds of various kinds – and the Boston Globe reported recently that he has continued to push in this direction behind the scenes.