Obama says Wall Street regulations should move forward
(CBS News) In light of JPMorgan's $2 billion loss, President Obama says regulations and oversight passed by Congress in 2010 need to be implemented. Using his campaign slogan, the president said in his weekly address, "We've got to keep moving forward."
The president called on Republican lawmakers who support a repeal of the Dodd-Frank Act -- new rules for banks and financial institutions - to "stand on the side of reform."
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon announced on May 10 that his bank lost $2 billion dollars through risky transactions, which many Democrats say proves that Wall Street needs strong oversight. Many Republican members of Congress and congressional candidates, however, have opposed the Dodd-Frank Act. Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has also campaigned on the bill's repeal, and after JPMorgan's loss, Romney said it's how capitalism "works."
In his weekly address, the president said, "For the past two years, too many Republicans in Congress and an army of financial industry lobbyists have actually been waging an all-out battle to delay, defund, and dismantle Wall Street reform."
"We can't afford to go back to an era of weak regulation and little oversight; where excessive risk-taking on Wall Street and a lack of basic oversight in Washington nearly destroyed our economy. We can't afford to go back to that brand of 'you're-on-your-own' economics. Not after the American people have worked so hard to come back from this crisis," the president said.
Although the Dodd-Frank bill was passed in 2010, all of it has not yet been implemented. The bill aims to prevent banks from making risky investments that don't benefit its customers, creates a bureau to protect consumer's transactions, and requires banks to have more cash on hand to help deal with losses.
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Are they are so focused on getting rid of Obama that they have lost touch with the rest of society and reality? But, that's what happens when officials become corrupt.
Solution:
Term limits of 8 years for Congress and the Supreme Court. Now that's a constitutional amendment I can live with.
Essentially they are not going to say well you cant do this you cant buy that.
Essentially it is simple and seems smart. What they are doing is requiring the financial institutions to keep enough money in reserve as a percentage of their investments and worth so that when they do fail or do poor business practices we dont have to bail them out and they are not going to bring the rest of the country down with them.
I am for this. Seems smart.
BUT, Barack's lack of a core tires me. When did he get so polarizing?
Remember how he campaigned on the idea of precision? Saying he wanted to be a guardian of the free market, ensuring that it wasn't over-regulated and therefore stifled, whilst also ensuring that sufficient safeguards were in place to prevent Wall St. from taking excessive risks that put the public coffers in danger.
It's like he just clocked out and embraced rote ideology ... choosing instead to take one instance and extrapolate it into a black white ideological rule.
That's not the optimal way to go to optimize the economy :/
But when a Big Bank F-Up, then the Government needs to see Why!
Now do you see who Hands is in the Cookie Jar, or that Black Berry Pie Story from Old Al, and who has Pie on there FACE!!!!!
LOL!
Just like writing legislation for anything else, our congresscritters use knowledgeable people in their fields of expertise, but with these complicated and risky derivative instruments, it's hard to find anyone that understands them -- which is why JPMorgan lost $3 billion during a time of less volatility.
Just because you and your ilk hate government and try to use it as a scapegoat for everything wrong in America, it's a necessary piece of the puzzle, and is needed to keep the GREEDY in line to protect the people.
While Dodd-Frank is watered-down protection legislation, nonetheless it is to protect the people from the GREED of the banksters and Wall Street that destroyed our economy and lives during the 2000's. Less-regulation is not necessarily a good thing, and the repeal of Glass-Steagall that had been protecting us since the Great Depression, was a short-sighted mistake by the GOP.
If that's not enough to eliminate JPMorgan Chase-type disasters, then we really DO need to restore Glass-Steagall. That probably WILL mean (as the big bankers claim) that some kinds of business move from Wall Street to London or Hong Kong or Singapore. But losing that business will be a small price to pay for depositary institutions that actually protect ordinary Americans' deposits.
If restoring Glass-Steagall isn't enough, we need to break up the big banks. If even JPMorgan Chase -- widely considered the best-managed and most risk-conscious TBTF bank -- couldn't avoid this kind of idiocy, then there simply isn't any advantage -- to the American people or to the U.S. economy -- in having banks that are both too big to fail and too big to manage.
How insane is it, that our "Too Big to Fail" banks, are now even bigger today after the 2008 economic catastrophe?
Another problem in 2008, was that these banks were over-leveraged like never before to the tune of 33%, which means it only took a failure of 1% of their investments to topple the entire bank.