Senate Passes Financial Overhaul Bill<\/a>
Wall Street Journal<\/strong>
By GREG HITT and DAMIAN PALETTA
MAY 20, 2010<\/div>\n… The legislation, in broad terms, is designed to close the regulatory gaps and end the speculative trading practices that contributed to the 2008 financial-market crisis, which prompted federal regulators to engineer a series of taxpayer bailouts of financial institutions. The legislation would restrict bank trading in complex financial instruments known as derivatives, which are often used by companies to hedge against changes in commodity prices or interest rates.<\/font> Many lawmakers contend that speculation in derivatives, including by large banks, contributed to the 2008 crisis. <\/font><\/strong>The bill includes provisions that not only would create more oversight of the derivatives market but possibly force banks to spin off their derivatives-trading operations.<\/font><\/strong><\/p>\nThe bill would also create a new system and authority for regulators to liquidate large failed institutions. And it prohibits the government from propping up large institutions in the future with public money. The bill would create a regulator — within the Federal Reserve — with the mandate to protect consumers from abusive financial practices across a range of products, from home mortgages to credit cards.<\/font><\/strong> The regulator would have independent rule-making authority. But the agency’s rules could be reviewed — and blocked after the fact — by a council of regulators created by the legislation to protect the financial system more broadly against risky activities.<\/p>\nThe bill would also restructure the way financial companies of all sizes are overseen.
T<\/font>he Federal Reserve would have new powers to regulate the country’s largest financial firms, regardless of whether they are banks. The legislation consolidates the country’s national bank and thrift regulators into one agency to prevent companies from shopping for lighter supervision.<\/font><\/strong> It would also clear the way, for the first time, for the government to audit certain emergency-lending programs at the Fed …<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\nEvery summary I’ve read so far sounds good to me [at now over 1400 pages, it’s beyond my endurance to read the Bill itself, so let’s hope the summarizers are up to snuff]. The most important thing I see in the legislation is the absence of loopholes. I’m sure the creative types on Wall Street will find a few, but in-so-far-as-is-possible, the authors of this Bill seem to have done their homework:<\/div>\n
\n- \n
The legislation would restrict bank trading in complex financial instruments known as derivatives, which are often used by companies to hedge against changes in commodity prices or interest rates.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/li>\n- \n
The bill would create a regulator — within the Federal Reserve — with the mandate to protect consumers from abusive financial practices across a range of products, from home mortgages to credit cards.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/li>\n- \n
The Federal Reserve would have new powers to regulate the country’s largest financial firms, regardless of whether they are banks.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/li>\n- \n
The legislation consolidates the country’s national bank and thrift regulators into one agency to prevent companies from shopping for lighter supervision.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nI’ve been frittering with other things because I’m superstitious. If I don’t talk about Financial Reform, maybe it’ll actually happen. In the long run, this Bill is the biggest deal of them all. America needs to lead the way for the world to make the global economy [the inevitable global economy] actually work. So shhhhh! Don’t jinx it…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On second attempt, Senate breaks GOP-led filibuster of Wall Street reform bill. ThinkProgress By Pat G. 05\/20\/2010 Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid [D-NV] attempted to invoke cloture on Sen. Chris Dodd’s [D-CT] financial regulatory reform bill. However, the attempt failed 57-42, due to a number of factors: the absence of Sen. Arlen Specter [D-PA], […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}