Fair enough- but you don’t think Gramm-Biley-Leach had anything to do with the recent meltdown?
How about voting against the Wall Street reform legislation?
How about opposing the mortgage reform legislation described here. You can find that he opposed it by looking at vote #141 on his senate website viting record link above.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/ Krugman a Nobel winning economist, warned of what was going to happen to the economy years ago. He is hated because he does not agree that big banking and big business are not blameless.
Heh, OK. -2 points for Burr. Back down to 0.
After reading a few of his columns, I can see that he thinks greed is a bad thing. He also thinks economists are more concerned with pretty mathematics than how financial systems actually work.
He does provide another side to economy debates. I’m not sure how he proposes to regulate greed yet. He seems to favor more breaks and incentives for emerging businesses, but if they were successful, wouldn’t they become more investment fodder that can be bought, resold, then collapsed?
I think I’m beginning to see where an overlap of ideologies is what led to the gaping hole in our economy today. Republicans favor passing laws that allow investors, brokers, and business owners to make more money. Democrats favor laws that allow lower income earners to buy more things. Thus, both parties favor granting mortgage companies, realtors and banks more leeway in making homes available for buying, then seeing the cash pipeline flow. Neither party seemed to be concerned with the other side of the ledger sheet.
Not really. I think Wikipedia’s “Criticism” and “Defense” sections at the bottom sum up the arguments fairly well.
At best, I think you could argue it was a contributing factor. I like the economist’s comments in the opening of the “Criticisms” paragraph.
In my mind the overwhelming gasoline-for-the-fire was loose monetary policy combined with the government-backing of $5 trillion of lending via Freddie and Fannie, fueling an asset bubble.
Why is he back to 0? Where did his plus 2 come from?
Brad Miller seems a reasonable guy to me. Voted in favor of Wall Street reform, and IMO was on the right side of several other issues noted in the same link. Here’s another page on his record if you want to look more closely.
Well, the criticism side cites 3 economists, one with a Nobel, on its side. It also has reasons listed. The defense has 2 truth challenged politicians who either sponsored or signed the bill, 2 magazine articles (the one I checked didn’t explain how it wasn’t a cause, it just stated it wasn’t, them moved on to blaming the CRA), and 2 economists who claim that it actually softened the crisis. They claim this happened by allowing the losses the investment banks were taking to be absorbed by the large deposit banks they merged with. I really don’t think that’s a good argument. For example, I am pretty sure that BofA wishes it hadn’t bought Merrill Lynch. Essentially, they’re saying by involving the entire financial system, it caused the crisis to be less. My understanding may be faulty, but I think the problem was so great partly because the financial crisis exposed the entire financial system to the problem, so no one knew of any safe place to put their money.
The loose monetary policy didn’t help, either. Largely, there weren’t enough people on either side of the aisle that knew what they were doing, and cared. The people who did know what was happening and cared, such as Brooksley Born were actively suppressed by persons ideologically opposed to regulation. Some of those people, such as Greenspan, have since admitted their mistake. Others, not so much. You can’t throw the blame solely on one side of the Dem/Pub split, but the libertarian belief that markets would regulate themselves was a prime cause of the financial meltown.
I liked his support of stem cell research and cosponsoring GSE regulation enhancement. Plus, his opponent, Elaine Marshall, hasn’t really offered much more than “they screwed it up, so let’s vote 'em out” rhetoric. Right now, I’m seeing the Fannie/Freddie bloat as our biggest albatross, and at least he tried to do SOMETHING about it, even if it did get voted down.
I’m not really sure his stance on Wall Street and investors is a bad thing. I know you think it will lead to more runaway investor trading, making the rich richer and the poor poorer etc, but that means more high income earners will enter the top tax brackets. Sometimes the pig has to lead itself to slaughter, because the farmer’s not around.
The Dems have stayed faaaaar away from the notion of raising taxes for revenue. There’s more focus on aiding start-up enterprises, but there’s no guarantee their products and services will be in demand, especially if everybody’s cutting back.
It seems like the more I research into this, the less it matters, because WE’RE ALL DOOOOOOMED!!! 