Professor Elizabeth Warren, who chairs the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the TARP funds, was on the Rachel Maddow Show last night and described the rational for having a single Consumer Protection Agency that would regulate credit card rates, mortgages, and general financial transactions in America.
The Republican party, drunk on the deregulatory vino and still thinking it's 1999, have proclaimed that any such agency would be a terrible idea and would cause severe problems for business across America. Those problems of course would not be anything like the depression causing legislation, such as the Gramm-Leah-Bliley Act of 1999, which eliminated the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 and permitted the financial monstrosity of Citibank to come into existence. These same politicians, who continue to carry water for their Wall Street paymasters, want the public to believe that after the greatest economic collapse in the history of mankind (in absolute terms), that their deregulatory laissez-faire ideology is the solution and not the problem. What have these invertebrate shills for corporate-fascism done since the inception of the crisis? First, they denied that there was a problem, then they start screaming like hysterical little girls at a boy-band concert, proclaiming that if we didn't hand over everything, including Grandma's silver dinner utensils, to the banks, who caused the problem, that we would be all doomed and consigned to the soup-kitchens.
To date: the banks got their trillions of publicly backed dollars; executives of these financial firms received record bonuses for nuking the global economy; no meaningful legislation to prevent another crisis has been passed; and most economists, who first called the onset of the current depression, state that we are in worst shape than before the crisis.
To date: the banks got their trillions of publicly backed dollars; executives of these financial firms received record bonuses for nuking the global economy; no meaningful legislation to prevent another crisis has been passed; and most economists, who first called the onset of the current depression, state that we are in worst shape than before the crisis.
In the discussion segment, Professor Warren outlines why it is not only important to have meaningful regulations for all consumer products, but why regulations facilitate transparency, accountability, and prevent commercial fraud. She outlines her case by explaining, why if there had been a single consumer regulatory body in place, that much of the crisis stemming from the sub-prime loan fiasco and the shadow derivatives market, would not have occurred. Her "money" quote was:
What we have aren't regulators who are there to regulate on behalf of the public. What we have are regulators who are there to offer good deals to the banks.
Great thought and great article. Keep it up. Consumer Protection Agency Florida
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