Russ Feingold, Long For Tough Bank Regulations; Guest Posting
My old friend Bill Kaplan had this commentary posted on Wis.Opinion.com recently, and the unfolding banker-induced foreclosure scandal makes the need for Feingold-style bank regulations all the more prescient:
10/13/2010
Why Senator Feingold?
By Bill Kaplan
The column below reflects the views of the author, and these opinions are neither endorsed nor supported by WisOpinion.com .
The banking – Wall Street – housing bubble was collective irrational madness. Financial institutions peddled unsound home loans, packaged as bonds. These investments were sold as creditworthy, profitable and safe. But bankers and brokers knew otherwise, and bought credit default swaps (insurance) to protect themselves when the bonds went bad. Predictably the façade collapsed. The housing bubble with ever skyrocketing prices burst in 2007 under President Bush with catastrophic consequences.
Deindustrialization and U.S. factory jobs going abroad got much worse, with over two million manufacturing jobs nationally and 63,000 in Wisconsin lost. Income inequality looks like the 1920s. And, many with little savings face record levels of educational, housing and medical debt. Voters are anxious, fearful and angry. But should madness beget more madness?
Voters tell pollsters they want independent politicians not under the thumb of special interests, who will watch out for regular folks, work with their political opposites and even defy their own party. Then Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold is your man. He is the quintessential maverick and populist, rooted in Wisconsin history and tradition.
Senator Feingold has always fought for the common good, no matter who is president or which political party controls Congress.
Deregulation that began under President Clinton helped produce the 2007 financial implosion. The Clinton administration supported the GOP-led repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had successfully regulated financial institutions by separating commercial Main Street banks from investment Wall Street banks, so federally insured banks would not be involved with risky speculation. (In the 1920s National City Bank – now Citigroup – then the largest U.S. bank, repackaged bad loans from Latin America and sold them as safe investments
* Senator Feingold voted against the Bush-sponsored TARP. He called for the Bush administration and Congress to “offset the cost of the proposed bailout so that taxpayers don’t get saddled with it….including asking Wall Street to bear at least some of the cost….add meaningful provisions to help families facing foreclosure….and address the deeply flawed regulatory structure that paved the way for this crisis.” Bush, a deregulator, did not listen.
President Obama was willing to regulate financial institutions. And, there is much that is good in the financial reform bill that passed. But Feingold fought to make it stronger by supporting a bipartisan amendment to “restore the Glass-Steagall firewall between Wall Street and Main Street” and other amendments to impose “strict limits on the size of financial institutions” and to end some of the worst abuses of credit-default swaps. His amendments lost and so the final bill failed “Feingold’s test for real reform.” He voted no, but fights on.
-- Kaplan wrote a guest column from Washington, D.C. for the Wisconsin State Journal 1995-2009.
1 comment:
The banker scandal goes far beyond the home mortgage mess. Commercial construction loans at many of the bigger regional banks such as National City, bought out under US Treasury manipulated TARP funding, became a gold mine for bank officials individually while stripping bank loan coffers. Since these loans typically are made with "at will" or "on demand" clauses buried in the fine print, the banks and their legal staff figured out that they could simply slow the funding of draws against those loans. When the inevitable problems of multiple small businesses doing work that depended upon that guaranteed funding arose, the banks' foreclosure experts then called the loans, forcing the loans into default. The properties that secured those loans, with millions of dollars invested in the construction, could now be sold to companies set up specifically to buy those notes from the bank at pennies on the dollar - companies with cross-ownership of insider bank officials and consultants. The businesses that started the projects were thus put into bankruptcy. The courts, being used to handling defaulted loan cases by deferring to the foreclosure attorneys for the banks, consistently upheld the banks' "right" under its contract terms to act without cause and in bad faith. Put into bankruptcy by the banks' acts, the developers and related companies were unable to fund legal action for relief.
Added to this apparent fraudulent and corrupt theft of property, Treasury Secretary Geithner expressed that TARP funding was to be used only for NEW loans, not EXISTING ones, giving the green light to the banks' destruction of both its borrowers and its shareholders, and the theft of millions of dollars in property.
Post a Comment