Obama-Dodd-Frank FinReg Monstrosity Delays Derivatives Curbs until 2022!

Webster G. Tarpley
TARPLEY.net
July 15, 2010

The Obama-Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, a miserable excuse for real Wall Street reform, is now about to gain final approval in the Senate. This wretched bill is now supported by the New England liberal (meaning Wall Street) Republican clique including Olympia Snow, Susan Collins, and Scott Brown, who are joined by the notoriously corrupt reactionary Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska. This bill will create a multitude of new regulations and a number of large new bureaucracies, but it is utterly devoid of any bright-line prohibitions against the causes of the financial panic which struck the United States in 2008, and which continues to the present day in the form of a world economic depression.
The cause of the 2008 banking panic was that zombie banks and hedge fund hyenas were speculating with toxic and highly leveraged derivatives. The new bill does virtually nothing to attack the causes of this ongoing financial disintegration. It is a total defeat for the interests of the American people, and an historic victory for the Wall Street financier oligarchy which owns both the Democratic and Republican parties.
Stockbrokers and investment bankers have battled mightily to avoid any legal compulsion to act in the best interests of their clients, who are often the retail investors which both parties claim to care so much about. The new bill will not prevent unscrupulous used-car dealers from ripping off their customers through inflated financing costs. There is nothing in the bill to stop the plague of foreclosures, which last year turned almost 4 million American families into displaced persons on the home front. There is no ban on the disastrous use of Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs), the financial equivalent of time bombs, which are ruining the lives of so many millions of Americans. There is no cap on leverage banks can use in financial transactions. Despite widespread complaining about the Federal Reserve, this bill gives the Fed more regulatory power rather than less. It represents the complete triumph of the Wall Street derivatives lobby, so much so that even hardened cynics are astounded by the impudence and insolence of Obama and both parties in the Congress.

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