Posted by
KsReaganite on Saturday, September 20, 2008 5:07:03 PM
Sorry for my absence. I have been on the road for work all of the previous week and this week was also busy with some changes at work. Those of us who do have employment should be thankful to our Lord always, but especially in these times, for providing an avenue for sustenance from His bounty.
Many jobs are being lost. But the wrong people are losing those jobs. Those who should be losing their jobs are bureaucrats, liberal members of Congress, and whining newspaper editors who have helped in a big way to bring about our current financial crisis. By continuously and vigorously pushing banks, at the pain of legal and reputational damage, to provide ever bigger mortgages to those who could ill afford such mortgages, these elites salved their color- and class conscious consciences at the cost of commonsense. They compounded that phenomenal lack of commonsense by getting the liberal bureaucrat run Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae monstrosities to back up those shaky mortgages which the liberal bureaucrats then sold to commercial banks who, through greed and fear, lapped it up and passed the risks on to their stakeholders and insurers. The results are all around us. Now we are getting the government to fix what its own over-regulation broke in the first place. We should have never had entities like Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and Sallie Mae; free market principles do not allow for such government run corporations whose primary purpose-contrary to public perception-is to provide million dollar jobs to retreads from the Democratic benches in Congress and Democratic administrations. Guess whose campaign boards and coffers are filled with high level Freddie and Fannie people and money? Yep..it is Barack Obama.
Th solution is not to re-regulate and turn back GLBA..which in itself is an overtly verbose document. Rather, the principled approach of streamlined oversight with independent watchdogs consolidated under one roof should be undertaken. As a former banking professional, I can assure you that the alphabet soup of SEC, FDIC, FRB, CFTC, OCC, OTS, and NCUA simply makes for too many cooks in the watchdog kitchen and serves nobody but Washington insider lawyers, lobbysists, and their families, friends, and misstresses looking for cushytaxper funded jobs. We should collapse all of those agencies, witht the exception of the FRB system, into a single Financial Regulatory Authority which should be mandated to do its own research, monitoring, and enforcement rather than relying on the battalions of lawyers and 'staff' that these political appointees on boards often do. This way, a single source can be held accountable for the stability of the markets.