financial reform

6:05

This hearing has now been going for more than eight hours, and for better or for worse, I need to head over to do an interview with Al Jazeera English. It goes on at 7:00. I'll be talking about financial reform, in addition to the Goldman fraud case.

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6:00 more »

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Last night, Senate Republicans proved beyond any doubt that when it comes to the economy, they stand with Wall Street and against everybody else. Joined by lone Democrat Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), Republicans successfully filibustered the procedural technicality of opening debate on Wall Street reform. It's an unmistakable ploy to kill the bill and collect campaign cash from bigwig bankers. The coming weeks won't be pretty.

Republicans are going to be battered by this filibuster. Financial reform is popular, and nobody on Capitol Hill wants to be seen as the agents of Wall Street in Washington come November. Republicans are hoping to rhetorically counter Obama's proposals, negotiate a fatally weakened reform package, and then vote with Democrats for reform-in-name-only before the elections. But the U.S. financial system is broken and voters know it needs strong medicine. more »

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This may be the single biggest lie in modern American history: "Most Republicans want a bill," said Sen. Richard Shelby, "but they want a substantive bill." We've criticized the Democrats plenty of times on the issue of financial reform, and the Dodd bill isn't perfect. But this wasn't a yea-or-nay vote about a bill. It was a vote to decide whether Senators would even be permitted to debate the bill. That difference means everything. more »

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Last week, Larry Summers, the top economic adviser to President Barack Obama, gave a startlingly dishonest interview with PBS Newshour's Jeffrey Brown. more »

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If you've ever wondered what the phrase "the sound of silence" means, you should've been listening when the President invited "the titans of industry" to join him in promoting financial reform this morning.

The President's speech walked a fine line between vision and reality. At times it seemed almost an internal dialog between the technocrat who sees the problems and knows how to fix them, and the political pragmatist who wants to reap electoral rewards from whatever bill finally gets passed.

"Between the dream and the reality," wrote T. S. Eliot, "falls the shadow." The President's speech demonstrated that he sees what needs to be done. But reform has to make its way through the legislative shadows on Capitol Hill. That means it's up to the rest of us to create the political climate that makes that makes genuine reform possible - or, better yet, inevitable. more »

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President Barack Obama identified five major problems on Wall Street in his speech at Cooper Union today. Unfortunately, the solutions he has proposed to these problems either will not work, or are not included in the legislation that passed the Senate Banking Committee under the stewardship of Chris Dodd (D-CT). Here they are, one-by-one:

Too Big To Fail more »

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Despite strong rhetoric against aggressive Wall Street lobbying and deceptive Republican attacks, President Barack Obama appears ready to declare victory on a tepid and ineffective financial reform bill. more »

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Tuesday's hearing on Lehman Brothers' now infamous Repo 105 scam was only tangentially related to the megabank's accounting deceptions and subsequent collapse. That story is simple: Lehman almost certainly committed fraud, regulators failed to stop it, and many of the people who screwed up under President George W. Bush inexplicably remain in power under President Barack Obama. more »

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4:40

Black just said Repo 105 was not just fruad, but a felony. It was a deliberate misrepresentation of the company's financial condition that was "material" to investors. more »

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The Hill published a truly outrageous op-ed yesterday by a payday lending front group, and the publication didn't bother to tell readers it was providing a platform for a predatory hatchet-woman. more »

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