Looks like Obama has learned something from heath care reform. He’s not trying to reach a bipartisan compromise with this one. Instead he’s proposing a liberal bill and is daring the Republicans to vote against it.
The real challenge is the Senate, where it needs at least one Republican to pass. It comes to the Senate floor next week.
Unlike with the highly imperfect health care law, the Democrats have the winds on their backs for this one. They can’t blame a weak bill on politics this time. Everyone hates Wall Street. I’m mildly optimistic, but only because you can never be too optimistic in politics.
My first reaction to the WaPo article was to the picture: holy crap - Boehner and Obama are the same color! Step away from the fake tan, John…
But more on topic, the Republicans are unlikely to vote for this if there’s any chance of it making the Obama administration look good, regardless of the merits and demerits of the actual bill. They’d have to be facing a genuine threat of voter revolt in their individual districts before getting on board. After health insurance reform they can’t let Obama have another popular win. At best they may offer a counterproposal which would allow them to take credit for it, but this presupposes a level of sense suspiciously lacking in Congress these days.
As for the bill itself (for which I have no details yet): in principle I’m all for separating retail banking business from investment/financial speculation business in order to protect banking customers from the risks of imprudent speculation. That said, those sorts of speculation bring in a lot of money to those banks and if you move that income stream into a separate entity the retail banks are going to be looking for other ways of raising money, which usually means more customer fees and less attractive interest rates. Nothing is simple in the big money biz.
He didn’t try with the health care bill either. Either that, or he simply doesn’t have a clue what sort of reforms would actually appeal to Republicans, and improve your system to boot.
I expect to see another bloated, corrupt piece of garbage that does more to benefit special interests than to actually improve your securities law.
200 amendments! Two-bleeding-hundred! You have a funny definition of “not trying”.
However, I am also suspicious of financial reform bills because the financial sector is positively pouring money into DC to ensure that their gravy train is not derailed. I don’t think Congresspeople (in either House and in either party) have enough backbone to ignore that kind of cash for long. I too foresee big loopholes all over the place.
As an ex dereivatives investment banker even the democratic bill isn’t going far enough. Bring back something like Glass -steagal. Wall Street simply will not police itself, especially now the old private company partnerships are gone.
Also ‘everyone’ knows the banks have a free put from uncle sugar. Plus there is still so much dubious radio active waste on the banks books (thank you FASB).
Personally I doubt it. Republicans opposed health care reform just for political reasons. But business regulation is their bread and butter - they’ll fight this harder than they’ll fight anything else.
And where is the push for reform supposed to be coming from? People can be convinced thay have a direct interest in issues health care or national security but financial reform seems like an abstract issue to most voters.
So the opponents of financial reform will be fighting tooth and nail against it and the proponents of financial reform will be giving it tepid support. Therefore, I don’t see it happening.
No, there’ll be a bunch of loopholes you could drive Goldman Sachs through in anything they manage to pass. Google “little punk staffers” and you’ll see why. Both bills have actually been written by the banking lobby, they’ll only get passed if they still leave the banks in control. And we still haven’t dealt with the current crisis, all we’ve done is float a huge amount of government money under the financial system (as have all the other major economys) which is currently propping up the markets. The system was massively overleveraged to start with and all we’ve done in response to the leverage is create even more leverage via government funding. So in a decade or so we’re going to get an even bigger meltdown, and that’s if everything goes well. If for instance the various euro economys can’y put together a mechanism to bail out Greece (and probably Portugal, Spain, Ireland etc.) the amount of exposure euro banks have to Greek and other euro debt will erode their wafer thin capital ratios and (lots of euro banks being primary dealers in the US and massively interconnected via derivatives trades etc. with US banks) set off an even bigger meltdown than 2008.
So on the bright side after the next meltdown things will be so bad that bankers and their lobbyists will be hanging from lampposts and almost certainly we’ll then see effective reform.
I don’t see it as an abstract issue. Especially in the wake of a recession, foreclosure crisis, and record levels of unemployment all caused by Wall Street. People have a direct interest in making sure this crisis doesn’t happen again. But unlike health care, this reform will not affect the lives of ordinary Americans, so there is less change to be scared off. The things to see as abstract - the bill regulating wall street and not ordinary Americans - will help make the bill more popular.
The GOP is attacking the reform effort by claiming that it is a Wall Street bailout. The fact that the GOP is not defending Wall Street in public is very telling of the anger voters have for Wall Street.
Another reason this bill will be more successful is that voters trust Democrats on economic reform more than they trust Republicans. Since the GOP is trying to paint the bill as helping Wall Street, it will be a lot easier for the Democrats to deal with that misconception than the Health Care fears spread by Republicans. If the GOP wants get into a fight with the Democrats over which party the voters will perceive as more pro-Wall Street, then that’s a fight they will sorely lose. To understand why, all you have to do is look at what happened to Obama’s poll numbers after the financial meltdown in 2008.
That phrase is just Boehner telling the financial industry not to listen to Democratic staffers. But Boehner is not in control of this bill, and the House has passed a bill already. Boehner can bitch all he wants but he’s not going to be able to change anything.
Not if the economy rebounds and we pay off our debt, but I guess you don’t think that will happen.
The answer to the question posed in the OP is: maybe.
We’ll either have a strong one, or none at all. Now that Lincoln’s on board, there’s little chance of a watered-down bill. That’s going to make the GOP less likely to offer any support, because they’re beholden to Wall Street. But we broke their backs with health care, and can they really be soooo stupid as to filibuster a bill to reign in risky, complex, unregulated investments in the midst of a massive recession caused by the prevalence of risky, complex, unregulated investments? All things being equal, I’d like to see the bill pass, but if it doesn’t because of GOP obstructionism on the eve of the mid-terms, that’s not the worst thing that could happen.
It’s smoke and mirrors. People understand concepts like pharmacy co-pays - that’s something they experience directly. But high-level financial policies? That’s unknown territory to 99% of the people in this country. They have no personal knowledge of what’s sound financial policy and what’s foolish. And they don’t know what would be effective as a reform and what wouldn’t.
So all the Republicans have to do is step forward and claim they have a better reform platform than the Democrats do. How is the average voter going to know who’s right? All they can judge is who sounds more believable. Big business special interests will draft the Republican plan to benefit themselves and then help the Republicans sell it to the voters.
It shows the GOP mentality on this. You might think that they’ll balk at defending the most hated institutions and people in the country but they won’t, they’ll just invent a death panels meme to mislead their base, who, let’s face it, are more than happy to be misled over anything Obama tries to do. And if the first death panels piece of bs doesn’t work they’ll come up with a new one. Currently they’re telling their base that the financial reform bill is actually just another huge bailout for Wall Street and if that doesn’t work they’ll come up with something else. You’ve got to remember that their target audience are people who think Jimmy Carter caused the meltdown in the first place and Obama bailed the banks out. Also. Enough Dems will be bought off by the banks not to push too hard for reform. Whatever bill eventually passes will be described as “comprehensive” and as having solved the problem but in reality it’ll be a piece of shit. And two or three years down the line the banking lobbyists will have succeeded in weakening whatever safeguards/regulation it does bring in. Basically on reform you have to bet whether a bunch of donation-hungry politicians of whom the key players have aspirations to become banking lobbyists/directors/consultants of banks when they leave office can outsmart and outlast the best-funded (by a million miles) lobbying operation in history. I know who my money is on.
And the economy could rebound and we pay our debt off to pre-meltdown levels, but now that the entire financial system is explicitly backstopped by the government the next meltdown (and consequent debt via bailout costs, recession, lost revenues etc.) will dwarf the 2008 one. And I’d bet we won’t have paid all the debt down by the next meltdown too.
uh, really? i’m not an ibanker but i was under the impression that the derivatives market is rather important to hedging risk. even if it’s not, it seemed like a fairly innocuous and half-hearted attempts for money managers to seek arbitrage in a sea of noise.
the recession was brought on by the bottoming out of one very small piece of the derivatives market - toxic repurposed credit derivatives. as a result, the entire derivatives market is going to be shut down? i don’t see the logic behind that.
anyway, i’m having problems understanding what the bill is trying to do, and how the bill is going to do it. it’s going to regulate the traders? banks? just banks headquartered in America? loans/commodities/rates set in America?
If Democrats go up against Republicans on economic policy with uninformed voters, then the Democrats will get an easy win. Voters still remember the economy under Clinton. McCain got crushed by Obama when the economy became the number one issue. I don’t see the Republicans winning this fight.
As for Democrats getting bought out by Wall Street interests, that’s always possible, but the question is to what extent. Wall Street will have to make sacrifices for this law, the question now is how much. No matter how much money Wall Street has there is no way they can come out of this in a better position than they were before. If the GOP were in power I would say maybe, but now it’s looking unlikely.
But that was partly anti-incumbent bias and partly McCain’s blundering about “pausing” his campaign to go off to Washington to do…nothing, actually. All Obama had to do at that point was not make any gaffes.
You haven’t been keeping up on right wing talking points. The current line is that it wasn’t the Clinton economic boom - it was the Gingrich economic boom.
Of course, this is just the first draft. In ten years, they’ll figure that enough time has passed they can do a complete revision and claim that there was a major recession during Clinton’s administration and the economy recovered under Bush.
Old news. The dotcom bubble thing has already been inflated [sic] into a major economic crisis that the Clinton administration dumped onto Bush and which he dealt with handily.
Oddly enough I don’t give Gingrich or Clinton credit for the economic boom. And I blame Clinton for the deregulation that got us into this mess.
Yet a lot of democrats and independents give Clinton credit for the economic boom. Republicans in general probably don’t, but I think there are enough moderate republicans in the Senate who understand that Wall Street needs to be regulated. Keep in mind that Snowe, Collins, and Scott Brown are all from States that voted for Obama. Their constitutes won’t tolerate a vote against regulating Wall Street the same way the tolerated a vote against changing the health care system.
We’ll never have reform until people like the Tea Partiers realize that we have more to fear from bankers and brokers than we do from two people of the same sex getting married.