Sunday, January 25, 2009

Obama, Democrats Begin Process to End Thirty-year Social Experiment

Stephen Labaton at the New York Times publishes this online front page story which is supposed to put the brakes on granting home loans to unqualified buyers: (emphasis mine)

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration plans to move quickly to tighten the nation’s financial regulatory system.

Officials say they will make wide-ranging changes, including stricter federal rules for hedge funds, credit rating agencies and mortgage brokers, and greater oversight of the complex financial instruments that contributed to the economic crisis.

Broad new outlines of the administration’s agenda have begun to emerge in recent interviews with officials, in confirmation proceedings of senior appointees and in a recent report by an international committee led by Paul A. Volcker, a senior member of President Obama’s economic team.

A theme of that report, that many major companies and financial instruments now mostly unsupervised must be swept back under a larger regulatory umbrella, has been embraced as a guiding principle by the administration, officials said. LINK

If this regulatory legislation gets put into law, it will become the largest "umbrella" ever to cover the ass's of many who looked the other way when government watch-dogs, (and certain economist), pointed out this social experiment was a recipe for financial disaster. The extension of credit to un-qualified buyers, (and the markets that created the process of shuffling/bundling bad paper), are the unchecked financial instruments that may very well break this nation.

While there is plenty of blame to go around for this debacle, longtime/lifetime government legislators, (such as Chris Dodd and Barney Frank), who ran the committees that should have been aware of this crisis either turned a blind eye, or were totally incompetent and derelict in their duties. The scary part is these same morons will be responsible for writing the legislation that may cover their collective asses.

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