A Quick Primer on the Fight For Financial Regulation
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Christopher Hayes
Apr 1, 2010, 1:59:48 PM4/1/10
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Hey all:
My latest Capitolism column attempts to catch folks up on where we are in the fight for financial regulation. While health care has taken up most of people's bandwidth, financial reform legislation has been moving through both houses and now looks like it might be passed this year. I outline three areas that progressive should pay special attention to: the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, derivatives regulation and Too Big To Fail.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100419/hayes
Here's the broader point: "There are two ways of viewing the financial crash. One way is as a technical failure with a technical solution--adjusting the mechanisms of oversight, granting regulators new abilities, making market transactions more transparent and aligning incentives in a more productive fashion. That's largely the view taken by the Obama administration, and it's the logic that suffuses much of the pending legislation. The other way to view the problem is as a fundamentally political one with a singular root cause: the banks have too much power. From this perspective, the most important result of reform would be to reduce that power, something each of the three reforms above would help do."
Hope everyone is well. The Breakdown is on break this week as the magazine prepares a relaunch of its website. Will be back next week.
Happy Spring!
-c
My latest Capitolism column attempts to catch folks up on where we are in the fight for financial regulation. While health care has taken up most of people's bandwidth, financial reform legislation has been moving through both houses and now looks like it might be passed this year. I outline three areas that progressive should pay special attention to: the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, derivatives regulation and Too Big To Fail.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100419/hayes
Here's the broader point: "There are two ways of viewing the financial crash. One way is as a technical failure with a technical solution--adjusting the mechanisms of oversight, granting regulators new abilities, making market transactions more transparent and aligning incentives in a more productive fashion. That's largely the view taken by the Obama administration, and it's the logic that suffuses much of the pending legislation. The other way to view the problem is as a fundamentally political one with a singular root cause: the banks have too much power. From this perspective, the most important result of reform would be to reduce that power, something each of the three reforms above would help do."
Hope everyone is well. The Breakdown is on break this week as the magazine prepares a relaunch of its website. Will be back next week.
Happy Spring!
-c
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