No one could have predicted:
The Senate’s top Republican on Tuesday called on Republicans to oppose the Democratic Wall Street reform bill because it does not adequately safeguard against the government’s power to bail out massive banks in the future.
“If there is one thing Americans agree on when it comes to financial reform, it’s absolutely sure they agree on this,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said in a speech on the Senate floor. “Never again should tax payers be expected to bail out Wall Street from its own mistakes. We cannot allow endless tax payer-funded bailouts for big wall street banks.”
Watching the Democrats fumble this is going to be especially infuriating.
slag
Here’s a thought, there, Mitchie…How about you and your boys get together to propose more pronounced and substantive financial reform, then?
Robertdsc-iphone
Call me a McArdle but doesn’t he have a point?
Bob L
Lovely, the real problem isn’t widespread fraud on Wallstreet, it is the government’s unwillingness to let the economy from being destroyed. Alterism is the ONLY vice in the conservative mind.
russell
The Republican party platform for this fall will be:
Democrats sold you out to Wall St.
We are the little guy’s friend.
And they’ll win a few on that basis.
Read’em and weep.
Napoleon
@Robertdsc-iphone:
Yes and no. On its face, sure he makes sense, but back in the real world no matter who is in office (short of Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich being elected) if a financial meltdown happens and it looks like some financial institutions will take the economy with them they will get bailed out. The details may differ depending on who is calling the shots but no one is going to want the total implosion of the American economy to happen on their watch (K-thug has talked about this several times on his blog).
So the real question is what type of reform do you pass to make it less likely to happen and if it does easier and cheaper to deal with.
dmsilev
@Robertdsc-iphone: No, because the odds of that being the real reason for them voting no is about the same as the odds of Sarah Palin being made an honorary member of Mensa.
dms
mr. whipple
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_04/023321.php
Rhoda
@Robertdsc-iphone: No, he doesn’t have a point. Frank Luntz decided a while back that financial reform was too popular so the Republicans needed to rebrand any reform as a bailout for banks in the future.
Adam Sorenson at Time’s Swampland does a side by side comparison of the Luntz memo and McConnell’s speech.
I don’t think that the Democrats will fumble this; from the way Axelrod was talking and the comments from the White House it seems the democrats are looking for a fight here. The Republicans can try to run this bull; but the Democrats seem to me to be ready. Mostly because, the MSM pretty much knows the play thanks to the Luntz memo.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Shorter Mitch McConnell: We are proud to announce that after many months of strenuous labor toiling in the dungeons of Isengard, Frank Luntz has finished breeding the Uruk-hai 2.0.
soonergrunt
Water is wet. The sun rises in the east. What else is new?
The Moar You Know
You know, that’s a pretty smart move on McConnell’s part – score some big populist points (and they will), block actual financial reform (which will keep the big money donors interested) and, when confronted with a similar crisis a few years in the future, scream that Democrat regulation has tied their hands and left them unable to deal with the problem. They’ll then repeal the law and bail the banks out anyway, as any government would.
Win fucking win.
Obama should have read more about how FDR dealt with his bank crisis, looks like.
EDIT: this is also a cartload of red meat for the teabaggerati and Paultards alike.
El Cid
DAMN THOSE WALL STREET BAILOUT DEMOCRATS GEORGE W. BUSH AND HANK PAULSON!
Mr Furious
Mitch is full of shit, but he’s already trumped anything the Dems trot out for messaging.
Bnut
In other news, my dog licks his own butt.
srv
Lenin was right about the rope, he just didn’t realize the masses would be swinging from it also.
Karmakin
There’s nothing that Obama can do. Regulation is going to be a bust, they’ll always find a way around it. Also, regulation relies on the quality of the regulators, and that’s something that always will be fluctuating in any democracy.
The only way to prevent bank bailouts from being necessary is to drain the pool. By creating wealth taxes and raising capital gains taxes to get the massive amount of money out of the speculation markets. But nobody will do this because mom and pop’s retirement funds and property values are also part of said pool.
It’s not that politicians are corrupt. It’s that our middle and upper classes are too fucking entitled.
Mr Furious
@Rhoda:
You have waaay more faith in the MSM than I do. Luntz’s message will be treated as one side, and the talking head will challenge the ill-prepared Dem Congressperson guest to knock it down. At best, it’s “he said, she said.” More often it will be a guy like Chuck $chumer looking like he’s backpedaling, and the Luntz meme is left standing.
mai naem
I think Mitchie should go work in a Kentucky Coal Mine, preferably one owned by Massey. Also too, his wifey, former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.
The Moar You Know
@srv: “we will hang together or most assuredly we will all hang separately.”
Looks like the point is, we all get to the gallows one way or another.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Karmakin:
Bingo, we have a winner.
The Truman-Eisenhower era top marginal income tax rates stabilized the post-WW2 economy by taking money out of the hands of people who have nothing better to do with it than speculate in the financial markets, and putting it into the hands of folks who spent it, in ways that supported the manufacturing economy. We need to get back to that tax structure, adjusted for the current income distribution. This is the third time in our history (after the Gilded Age and the Roaring 20s) that excessive wealth and income concentration has led to rampant speculation, massive market volatility, and a severe depression. As the old saying goes, once is an accident, twice is coincidence, and three times means somebody is sending you a message.
Zuzu's Petals
Excuse me while I fall over laughing:
Comrade Dread
Awesome. So I presume you’ll be sponsoring legislation to expand anti-trust laws and enable the Justice Department to break up Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and their ilk so that no one bank can ever have the power to threaten the economy?
Rick Taylor
__
Oh yeah, that’s going to work. You hear that bankers? The next time your financial games bring the economy to the brink of oblivion, we’re going to put our hands in our pockets and let the world economy slide into great depression II. So you’d better be responsible, cause there will be no more handouts, no matter what. Riiiight.
__
One thing we can be grateful for is the economic meltdown happened on Bush’s watch. It was on a Republican’s watch that Paulson came forward and said, we need to give the banks hundreds of billions of dollars now, no questions asked, or the economy tanks. And it was a Republican administration that fought to give them that money. Democrats agreed and went along, and a Democratic President continued the policy, but no one honest and paying attention can pretend the Republican’s would do any differently, because they didn’t. Even Sarah Palin supported the bailouts, though her fans have managed to suppress that memory.
__
Whether one believes that bailing out the banks after they took insane risks with their deposits was the right thing to do, the government did it, and they[‘ll do it again if the same circumstances occur. The government always does this, whether Republicans or Democrats are running the show. Getting stern and wagging your fingers at bankers and saying next time there’ll be no bailout, and expecting them to change their behavior will accomplish precisely nothing. If we don’t want to be faced with the choice of spending of hundreds of billions of dollars are more to pay the banks for their bad decisions versus watching the world economy fall into the crapper, we need to, God forbid, regulate banks to ensure they follow conservative policies. If we leave it up to the magical hand of the free market where everyone pursues their self interest, that will dictate bankers making insane decisions that make them millions of dollars, even as it brings the economy to its knees when the consequences of their decisions come to fruition. We’ve seen this happen over and over and over again. Anyone who doesn’t get it is either stupid, lying, hasn’t been paying attention, or is so wedded to free-market ideology they can’t think straight.
Davis X. Machina
Untrammeled by a need to maintain any nagging connections with reality, it’s easy.
Dave Paulson
Mitchell’s already taken in over $1 million for the 2010 campaign from the securities and investment lobby. He’s in their pocket and so is Shelby. They’ll be trying to stall any legislation, and the problem on the Democrat side is that Dodd’s taking the biggest lobby payoff of all. I would like to think the Dems won’t blow this one, but they are just so feeble when it comes to spin . . . partially because they aren’t so inclined to bald face lies, but that’s another story.
Dodd has already watered down what Obama wanted. But there still may be hope with Elizabeth Warren posted as the watchdog. We’ll have to wait and see, but one thing’s for sure — it’ll be interesting.
licensed to kill time
Wow, the Republicans are voting no on something? What.A.Shocker.
J. Michael Neal
@mr. whipple: And, right on cue, Tim Geithner steps up to defend the banks and prevent any meaningful reform.
Oh, wait a minute:
Hey:
Jesus. The man can’t even sell us out properly.
Rick Taylor
__
I’d be entirely supportive if this argument was taken to its logical conclusion, and we passed laws that made it much easier to take over banks that failed. Somehow I don’t think Republicans would support that though.
J. Michael Neal
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: I’m not sure I want a return to 1950s marginal rates. I suspect that they are, overall, a net loser when they’re that high. 1970s marginal rates, maybe. 1980s marginal rates, no problem. I’m there.
However, I don’t think that tax rates will have much, if any, effect on the velocity of high finance. They wouldn’t have done a thing to prevent the speculation that we witnessed over the naughts. The big spender was the Chinese government, which came about its huge stack of money in a way that the US Treasury didn’t get a cut at all.
I really think that financial regulation is going to have to be tackled directly.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Comrade Dread:
Mitch’s ploy here is taken straight out of the segregationist playbook for fighting against federal civil rights legislation in the 1950s – propose amendments which are so far to the oppposite extreme (from the position you actually want to win), that you can be virtually certain the centrists in Congress will vote it down and then they will take the discredit for the reform effort failing, while giving you the outcome you wanted.
Sentient Puddle
Oh Jesus, this one’s a gimme…
Yes, and the current system allows for Wall Street to make these fuck-ups that require us to bail them out in the first place. No reform, and we will be bailing them out from bigger and even more spectacular failures in the future.
You’re welcome, Democratic leadership.
The Moar You Know
@J. Michael Neal: Half right.
The fundamental issue with derivatives is not a lack of transparency or regulation, although that has been the main source of our current woes; one that has remained entirely unaddressed, so far as I can see.
The fundamental problem is that they exist at all; they are not being used, as they have been advertised, as a source of insuring against risk – that job should fall to insurers, who have correctly realized that those risks that derivatives insure are too risky and too large for them to handle. What a derivative is in fact is a method of saying that you are insured for a bigger bet than you’d be willing to make otherwise – while not actually being insured at all.
I mean, shit, if I went to Vegas and knew that I had a CDO backing my bets, I could be playing billion-dollar a hand blackjack. It wouldn’t matter if I won or lost, because I wouldn’t be on the hook for it, the guy who wrote my CDO would be. And he wouldn’t give a shit either, because he’ll just turn to the government and say “The Moar You Know just ran up a 2 trillion dollar tab at the MGM Grand. Pay up or the economy collapses.”
And for the record, I am the world’s shittiest card player. The odds that backing my bets would not result in catastrophic losses is zero.
Kinda like a subprime mortgage.
The Moar You Know
ahhh, fuck, I’m in moderation for mentioning a card game.
cybrestrike
Naw, I think we’re used to them fumbling at this point. This should be the best shot the Democratic establishment in DC have of getting excellent support both politically and policy-wise. But I don’t think they’re going to successfully capitalize on it.
It’s going to be like watching T.O. drop the ball a million times in Buffalo.
The Moar You Know
Try this again:
@J. Michael Neal: Half right.
The fundamental issue with derivatives is not a lack of transparency or regulation, although that has been the main source of our current woes; one that has remained entirely unaddressed, so far as I can see.
The fundamental problem is that they exist at all; they are not being used, as they have been advertised, as a source of insuring against risk – that job should fall to insurers, who have correctly realized that those risks that derivatives insure are too risky and too large for them to handle. What a derivative is in fact is a method of saying that you are insured for a bigger bet than you’d be willing to make otherwise – while not actually being insured at all.
I mean, shit, if I went to Vegas and knew that I had a CDO backing my bets, I could be playing billion-dollar a hand (name of card game redacted to avoid moderation hell). It wouldn’t matter if I won or lost, because I wouldn’t be on the hook for it, the guy who wrote my CDO would be. And he wouldn’t give a shit either, because he’ll just turn to the government and say “The Moar You Know just ran up a 2 trillion dollar tab at the MGM Grand. Pay up or the economy collapses.”
And for the record, I am the world’s shittiest card player. The odds that backing my bets would not result in catastrophic losses is zero.
Kinda like a subprime mortgage.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@J. Michael Neal:
I’m proposing 1950s top marginal rates for two reasons, one political, the other policy oriented.
The political reason is to hook into the 1950s nostalgia that so many people uncritically hold. If that was a golden age, then let us reproduce the parts of it that worked.
The policy oriented reasons are twofold:
(1) the very high rates in the 40s and 50s were a rational way to cut down the high per-GDP national debt. Today we are in similar straits. We should move to post-JFK tax cut rates when we have debt-to-GDP levels similar to that era.
(2) If the very top rate is indexed high enough (say $100 million per year) it effectively caps the income curve. I think we have a real problem with a tax system that allows individuals to amass levels of wealth overlapping the lower end of sovereign nation states. National sovereignty itself is threatened by that, especially now that we are in the post-Citizens United era. Just look at Blankenship and his manipulation of the WV courts for an example of what happens when a single individual has enough wealth to overawe the political system as a whole. This is a point that Teddy Roosevelt understood I think – the state itself cannot be merely the first among equals vs the barons of capitalism, or popular sovereignty itself is at risk.
demimondian
@Robertdsc-iphone: No, not really.
There’s no reason to forbid the government from bailing out any industry. The problem with TARP was its unfairness — banks get billions, homeowners get the hose — not that it happened.
Comrade Dread
@The Moar You Know:
Even better, you could then bet heavily against yourself by buying your own derivatives and make riskier bets at the MGM Grand because you would stand to make even more money, assuming (of course) that the holder of the derivative could pay up or that the govt. would then bail you out.
And people wonder why mortgage lenders were willing to take applications filled out in crayon.
Tonal Crow
If you don’t want bailouts, you’ve got to have vigorous antitrust law and enforcement to prevent any entity from becoming “too big to fail”. Have the Democrats got the guts — and the political acumen — to force that sort of package down the GOPers’ throats?
Seanly
Can we haz peeple’s revolut1on now? I’m about ready for us to give full blown Marxist socialism a try – after a bloody revolution. Only problem would be that the Teabaggers would probably win and put the wrong half of the ruling class up against the wall.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
WoW, The Senate wingnuts are now triangulating with the Tea Baggers to try and get want they don’t want in hopes dems will not bail out banks and let our economy collapse to bring on the Apocalypse or at least a Chicago Cubs World Series Title. That’s 11 dimensional Russian Roulette. Top Barry Hussein.
Pangloss
A Resolution on Behalf of the President of the United States to Praise Mom, Baseball and Apple Pie
Democrats Yes 232 No 0
Republicans Yes 0 No 212
ET
Can’t figure out why/how they think this is going to play with the base. Obviously they want the money from Wall Street, but most individuals (conservative, liberal, independent) think the banks and financial sector are a problem.
And after all their posturing about the bank bailouts there is plenty of evidence that can be used against them by a savvy opponent (though I would say savvy is not necessarily a word I would use to describe Democrats).
I guess they are hoping no one notices – or at least calls them on it???
Remember November
Mr McConnell I’m a let you finish… …”bail out Wall St. from their own mistakes, which they then use to pay us in hefty donations so we can stop reform”
and it’s not Wall St, it’s the banks, which thanks to the repeal of Glass-Steagal pulled the plug on regulating banks as a primary savings institution and allowed JPMorgan free reign.
the irony is so lost on the American public.
someguy
@ The More You Know
So I guess that’s a vote in favor of closing the futures markets?
Ash Can
Fo’ shizzle. Anyone who thought the Republicans would support this in any way, shape or form was fooling him/herself.
Oh, I’m sure we’ll have our moments. But if they fumble it the way they fumbled HCR, I can live with that. Remember, when all was said and done, Obama had humiliated the GOP on national TV, Nancy Pelosi had ridden herd on the House, and even Harry Reid had fired off a few good zingers. And HCR, warts and all, passed.
I see no reason to expect anything radically different this time around. We may not end up with the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, but if the Dems were ultimately able to stand up to the healthcare/insurance lobby, they should be able to stand up to the big banks too.
maus
@Robertdsc-iphone:
Insincerity is not a point. Offering an alternative, or a “free market of ideas” would be a point. Obstructionism is not a “point”.
Giving them any respect because they utter something that “sounds” reasonable that they are never EVER willing to follow up on is a mistake. This goes for Dems as well, of course.
Tonal Crow
@someguy:
I hope not, because they work quite well.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@The Moar You Know:
This reads to me like you are conflating the sins of credit default swaps specifically with derivatives in general.
Splitting Image
@Pangloss:
Close.
Democrats Yes 213 No 19
Republicans Yes 0 No 212
The bill fails 213-231, proving that Democrats hate mom, baseball and apple pie. After all, if the Republicans had proposed the bill, it would have passed, right? Howcum the Democrats wouldn’t pass it, huh?
ericblair
@Comrade Dread:
…and there we have it. Counterparty risk. None of this would have happened if everyone had actually been able to pony up the bucks they promised to the next yoyo down the line. All of these turkeys made contracts (mortgages, CDSs, et cetera) they knew they couldn’t pay off if the shit hit the fan, but figured that it would never happen, they would be smart enough to avoid the flying shit, and/or anyways it would be such a disaster Uncle Sucker would have to step in. The buyers felt the same way, and weren’t inclined to look terribly closely at any of the obviously garbage promises they were buying in case they would have to miss the gravy train.
Pretty much all of the necessary regulations boil down to Thou Shalt Not Write Checks Thy Butt Can’t Cash and No We’re Not Taking Your Word For It.
danimal
Strangely, after HCR passed, I no longer expect the Dems to completely screw this up. Somehow, I’ve come to expect a (limited) amount of competence in passing legislation.
Give me time, my cynicism will be revived momentarily.
Nick
@The Moar You Know:
Declare a bank holiday, bail out the banks and then get all 313 Democrats n the House and a good portion of the Republicans to support regulation?
Nick
@Sentient Puddle:
I’m the common American voter and you lost me at require. Why are you Democrats so condesending”?
Martin
@ericblair:
Correct. Look, derivatives are fine. Hell, I’ve made money off of derivatives, and I’ve personally used them to hedge positions – and I’m a guppy out there. But it’s also possible, and not terribly difficult, to enter a position with unlimited downside risk – even for individuals. I’ve successfully worked up to being able to do equity spreads (I’ve never used this level) and I’m pretty sure that I could quickly get approval for naked writing of equity options.
There’s no regulation of these vehicles and who can access them. There’s no effort to ensure that individuals and funds aren’t overextending themselves and there is a LONG tradition of traders covering bad bets by placing more bets. And it’s damn hard in many cases to know if the party you are entered in a contract with can cover their end of the deal – after all, the big institutions employ a fuckton of really smart people to hide all the bad shit and make the place smell like chocolate pudding. The whole system needs to be dialed in several notches, but there’s no need to eliminate it. Like most things, it’s good in moderation and disastrous in excess.