Thanks to Chris Dodd, Lawrence Summers, Tim Geithner, and Paul Krugman among other luminaries for proposing the New Banking Reforms.
The Sherman Anti-Trust Act, The Federal Trade Commission Act, The Wheeler Lea Act, The Interstate Commerce Commission, The Treasury, Sarbanes-Oxley, The IRS, The FCC, OSHA, The FDA, The EEOC, The EPA, fifty state Attorneys General, the Federal Attorney General, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, The SEC, The Federal Reserve Board, the FDIC, HIPAA, the NLRB, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the National Credit Union Administration, the Office of Thrift Supervision, the SIPC, fifty state banking offices or commissions, the trial bar, fifty state and one federal legislature apparently just don’t do enough regulation.
Barney Frank said on July 14, 2008: “I think this is a case where Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are fundamentally sound. They’re not in danger of going under. I think they are in good shape going forward.” He and his peers had no culpability in the global contagion, of course. Early warning signs going back to the nineties were apparently not even shared with the august group on Capitol Hill. They were “shocked” to find gambling going on in this establishment, to paraphrase the great scene from Casablanca.
So we cheer that they will charge into the breach one more time on our behalf, confident that their newly created regulatory regime will solve what the hundreds of departments and laws affiliated with the list above and their employees (numbering in the six figures) could not do the last time around. As the great showman Carl Sagan said, “It strains credulity!”
Cannot wait to see how this turns out.
Lazy Jack
© Edward Hunter and Thanks for the Laughs, 2010
