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and you can too...,
2010-06-30 11:27:22
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ground zero mosquerade...,
2010-08-24 23:14:09
"The person in whose hands America had placed its hopes for finance reform was someone who once sang furniture jingles onstage with Lloyd Blankfein.":
... the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which allowed investment banks, insurance companies and commercial banks to merge, and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which exempted the entire derivatives market from federal regulation. Together, these two laws transformed Wall Street into a giant casino, allowing commercial banks to act like high-risk hedge funds, with a whole new galaxy of derivative bets to lay action on. In fact, the laws made Wall Street even crazier than a casino, because in a casino you have to put up actual money to make bets. But thanks to deregulation, financial companies like AIG could bet billions, if not trillions, without having any money at all to back up their gambles.
Dodd-Frank was never going to be a meaningful reform unless these two fateful Clinton-era laws - commercial banks gambling with taxpayer money, and unregulated derivatives being traded in the dark - were reversed. The story of how the last real shot at reining in Wall Street got routed tells you everything you need to know about how, and on whose behalf, our government works.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-08-10 16:42:38 CST |
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