She's got the whole deregulation thing mapped out and made a very strong and clear case in explaining the dire consequences we have suffered from it, beginning with the S&L crisis.
"We start[ed] pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric and what's the first thing we get: we get S+L crisis," Warren said. "Seven hundred financial institutions fail. Ten years later what do we get? Long Term Capital Management, where we learn that when something collapses in one place in the world it collapses everywhere else. Early 2000s we get Enron, which tells us the books are dirty. And what is our repeated response? We just keep pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric. So we have two choices, we are going to make a big decision, probably over about the next six months. And the big decision we are going to make is going to go one way or another. We are going decide, basically, hey we don't need regulation. 'You know, it is fine. Boom and bust, boom and bust, boom and bust, and good luck with your 401k.' Or alternatively we are going to say, you know, we are going to out with some smart regulation that is going to adapt to the fact that we have new products and what we are going to have going forward is we are going to have some stability and real prosperity for ordinary folks."
She also threw out a line worthy of the show she was on:
"Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell."That speaks to one of my concerns: the idea that some financial institutions got "too big to fail." And once you take away those consequences, you have given them a license to take risks, to cheat, and to obfuscate.
It's so refreshing to have smart people in charge who actually know what they're doing and are committed to fixing the problems instead of using the office to destroy the function of the office they hold.
Ralph
No comments:
Post a Comment