Wall Street deregulation pushed by Clinton advisers, documents reveal

[FreakinDJ]

Pretty interesting to me because from reading here at DU during the 2008 Crisis the meme was Bill Clinton was forced to sign the repeal of the Depression-era Glass Steagall Act.

When in fact as the documents show, his DLC handlers were pushing him to sign the act and in 1 case allowed a major bank to merge through back door channels during his administration.

Why is this important - Hillary undoubtedly will have some of the same handlers

Wall Street deregulation, blamed for deepening the banking crisis, was aggressively pushed by advisers to Bill Clinton who have also been at the heart of current White House policy-making, according to newly disclosed documents from his presidential library.

A Financial Services Modernization Act was passed by Congress in 1999, giving retrospective clearance to the 1998 merger of Citigroup and Travelers Group and unleashing a wave of Wall Street consolidation that was later blamed for forcing taxpayers to spend billions bailing out the enlarged banks after the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

The White House papers show only limited discussion of the risks of such deregulation, but include a private note which reveals that details of a deal with Citigroup to clear its merger in advance of the legislation were deleted from official documents, for fear of it leaking out.


http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/19/wall-street-deregulation-clinton-advisers-obama#img-1



http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/19/wall-street-deregulation-clinton-advisers-obama#img-2



http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/19/wall-street-deregulation-clinton-advisers-obama#img-3


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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/19/wall-street-deregulation-clinton-advisers-obama

[tazkcmo]

1. Yay!

Greed is good! Money is God! All hail Capitalism!















sarcasm

[FreakinDJ]

2. Its the "Privatize the Profits and Socialize the Losses" part I'm worried about

[tazkcmo]

5. That and

Clinton Advisors

[FreakinDJ]

8. Don't forget those DLC advisers have morphed into Hilary's 3rd Way advisers

[tazkcmo]

9. Exactly.

The incest is rampant.

[Enthusiast]

30. Me too.

Yeah! And change the bankruptcy laws.

[monicaangela]

3. Excellent information FreakinDJ

You will get many saying, well that was her husband, not her. Very interesting how people voluntarily pull the wool over their own eyes.

[tazkcmo]

6. Yup

Bill only counts when it's convenient. I'm just astounded that "serving" as First Lady is a qualification for any public office.

[noiretextatique]

38. Some are still claiming we get two for one

So his record is fair play.

[Octafish]

4. ''What would Goldman think?'' -- Larry Summers

Larry Summers: Goldman Sacked

By Greg Palast
Reader Supported News, September 16, 2013

Joseph Stiglitz couldn't believe his ears. Here they were in the White House, with President Bill Clinton asking the chiefs of the US Treasury for guidance on the life and death of America's economy, when the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers turns to his boss, Secretary Robert Rubin, and says, "What would Goldman think of that?"

Huh?

Then, at another meeting, Summers said it again: What would Goldman think?

A shocked Stiglitz, then Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, told me he'd turned to Summers, and asked if Summers thought it appropriate to decide US economic policy based on "what Goldman thought." As opposed to say, the facts, or say, the needs of the American public, you know, all that stuff that we heard in Cabinet meetings on The West Wing.

Summers looked at Stiglitz like Stiglitz was some kind of naive fool who'd read too many civics books.

CONTINUED...

http://www.gregpalast.com/larry-summers-goldman-sacked/

[FreakinDJ]

7. Larry Summers once again in 2 Dem administrations pushing Goldman Sacks policies

eerie reality

and Hillary saying those speaking fees mean nothing

[Octafish]

11. How could something she said 20 years ago matter?

Except it was 20 months ago. Or was it 2 months ago? Oh well, I need to be a good soldier and trust the rich to look after the poor. That is difficult to do, knowing what Goldman and all the Banksters did to the nearly extinct middle class.

[FreakinDJ]

13. 3rd Way has also morphed into Hilary's Attack Dogs

"That Social Security plan was the final moment for us," said Kessler of Sen. Warren. "Final moment" is a telling turn of phrase. Polls show that the public wants more genuinely progressive policies than those it is receiving from the Democratic Party leadership. Sen. Warren's popularity seems like a harbinger of that party's potential moved to the left -- a move that would render the "have it both ways" cynicism of the Third Way crowd obsolete.

Economically they're already obsolete. The Clinton/Third Way/DLC ideology -- which typically markets itself as "centrism," even though its economic policies are far to the right of public opinion -- was thoroughly discredited by the financial crisis of 2008. That crisis was caused in large part by Wall Street deregulation which they pushed, and it exacerbated the growing wage inequality and loss of social mobility which has devastated middle class and lower-income Americans.

And yet, their brand of Wall Street-friendly "centrism" made a remarkable comeback after 2008, thanks in large part to the Obama White House's influence on the Democratic Party -- and to corporate money's influence on the political process. Five years after the crisis, the entire nation is still seeing the disastrous effects of their economic policies on our nation's most intractable issues: unemployment, wage stagnation, and the lack of opportunity for most Americans.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=post&forum=1251&pid=1361809

[Enthusiast]

31. Yooge plus one!

[monicaangela]

10. And Hillary will be just as bad as bill when it comes to Wall Street

[Enthusiast]

33. Huge +1!

[Art_from_Ark]

12. "Cut it out!"

[nashville_brook]

14. keep your ears open for HRC using the term "modernization" RE Social Security reform

this has been in her platform for some time now.

she wants to create a separate private account that people can "opt-in" to. that would "modernize" the system, i.e. destroy it the way financial deregulation destroyed our financial safety net.

reading these documents it's clear that the term "modernization" is the focus-grouped word of choice that people are supposed to embrace when the blue dogs are screwing us.

[FreakinDJ]

15. 3rd Way has advocated "Only a Democrat can dismantle Social Security"

looks like they found their woman

[dixiegrrrrl]

23. That plan has been floated for some time, and would be very very bad.

It is a way to rob the retirement money once again.

Remember what happened to our 401-K and other types of retirement savings. Just when most of us were getting ready to retire and use the money, 2008 came along and the market, with our earnings, crashed.

Now they want the younger folks to buy into another Ponzi scheme.
I say Ponzi because the money we put into retirement plans was spent and gone, the banks used it, just as the money we put into
Social Security is spent every year and IOU Treasuries are supposed to be put in their place.

[Trust Buster]

16. Every level of American society chose greed over doing the right thing.

*The government deregulation.

*Wall street's toxic asset fraud.

*Credit ratings agencies slapping AAA on that garbage.

*Accounting firms ignored banks moving toxic assets off their books before and audit just to return them to the books after an audit.

*Mortgage lenders, who used to be the gatekeeper, issued loans to anyone because they knew that they'd be selling those mortgages, and thus their risk, off their books to Wall Street.

*Mortgage brokers, who exploded in numbers, we're making money hand over fist.

*The American people who saw real estate investment as a get rich scheme.

CONCLUSION: Bill and Hillary Clinton are not primarily responsible for the 2008 financial collapse despite Bernie supporter's efforts to want to blame every problem in the world on them.

[YOHABLO]

18. I don't think Bernie is blaming them full out, but Clinton was not looking out for the little guy.

That's for sure. I think they both love politics and the power it entails that they somehow lost their soul along the way .. you think? Just a little?

[Trust Buster]

22. The "little guy" used the inflated equity in their homes to fund a lifestyle they could not

Support based on their incomes. Not everyone mind you, but many were drunk in that hyper-inflationary housing market. Very similar to the dot.com bubble behavior.

[mikehiggins]

20. HRC and the Big Dog are not primarily responsible for the 2008 financial crisis.

There is plenty of blame to go around, from Goldman Sachs to Alan Greenspan and beyond. The dangers of deregulation should have been written clearly by the Savings and Loan swindle years earlier.

A really good flick describing what brought the economy down is The Big Short. Well worth seeing especially for Steve Carrell's performance.

The most telling line? "They knew they would get bailed out."

Too big to fail, too important to jail.

It is atrocious to hear those words drip so easily off of HRC's tongue.

Just another lie.

[George II]

17. Hillary Clinton will still win the Democratic nomination and be elected President.

[YOHABLO]

19. You don't know.

[hobbit709]

25. In which case the corporations have won again.

[Enthusiast]

34. Huge +1!

[gregcrawford]

21. Clowns to the left of us, jokers to the right...

... here we are, stuck in the middle with delusional fanatics who refuse to even acknowledge the cold, hard, irrefutable facts staring them right in the face. The banksters own both political parties, and the delusional would rather undermine their own well-being – and ours – than to admit they've been conned into making a YUUUUGE mistake.

It's a "heads, I win, tails, you lose" game that's been rigged from the git-go, and they are gleefully sandbagging the one person that might be able to guide us away from the edge of certain disaster.

[hobbit709]

24. you nailed it!

[Enthusiast]

35. Huge +1!

[Thinkingabout]

26. Yes, the CFMA of 2000 was passed with a yes vote by Bernie Sanders. Maybe Clinton had

lots of help.

[amborin]

27. that repeats Clinton's attempt to Mislead:

Hillary Blames Bernie for an Old Clintonite Hustle, and That’s a Rotten Shame
by
Robert Scheer
82 Comments

Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders during a break at the NBC-YouTube Democratic presidential debate on Sunday in Charleston, S.C. (Photo: Mic Smith / AP)

The Clintons have no shame, that much you can count on. That stupefying arrogance was on full display in the most recent presidential campaign debate when Hillary Clinton countered Bernie Sanders’ charge that she was compromised by her close ties to Goldman Sachs and other rapacious Wall Street interests with the retort: “Sen. Sanders, you’re the only one on this stage that voted to deregulate the financial markets in 2000, ... to make the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission no longer able to regulate swaps and derivatives, which were one of the main causes of the collapse in ’08.”

Hillary knows that the disastrous legislation, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), had nothing to do with Sanders and everything to do with then-President Bill Clinton, who devoted his presidency to sucking up to Wall Street. Clinton signed this bill into law as a lame-duck president, ensuring his wife would have massive Wall Street contributions for her Senate run.

Sanders, like the rest of Congress, was blackmailed into voting for the bill because it was tucked into omnibus legislation needed to keep the government operating.

The measure freeing Wall Street firms from regulation was inserted at the last moment in a deal between President Clinton and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Phil Gramm, R-Texas, who had failed in an earlier attempt to get the measure enacted. Clinton signed it into law a month before leaving office.

Sanders soon figured out that he and almost all other Congress members had been tricked into providing a blank check for the marketing of bogus collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps made legal by the legislation, of which a key author was Gary Gensler, the former Goldman Sachs partner recruited by Clinton to be undersecretary of the treasury.

Eight years later, when President Obama nominated Gensler to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, it was Sanders who put a temporary hold on the nomination, stating: “Mr. Gensler worked with Sen. Phil Gramm and [former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman] Alan Greenspan to exempt credit default swaps from regulation, which led to the collapse of AIG and has resulted in the largest taxpayer bailout in U.S. history.”

Today, Gensler is the top economic adviser to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. And the CFMA—key legislation that was “one of the main causes of the collapse in ’08,” enabling the great recession—is an enormous embarrassment that her husband on occasion reluctantly has conceded was drafted by his top aides and signed into law by him with great enthusiasm.

snip

Gensler in 1999 testified before Congress in support of the total deregulation of toxic derivatives: “OTC derivatives directly and indirectly support higher investment and growth in living standards in the United States and around the world.” As for the credit default swaps, the phony insurance packages that brought AIG to its knees and almost destroyed the world economy, Gensler testified that they should be exempted by his proposed legislation from regulation existing under the Commodity Exchange Act: “swap transactions should not be regulated under the CEA.” Had they been, the financial crisis could have been avoided.

Along with Gensler, Robert Rubin, who was Clinton’s treasury secretary and a former Goldman Sachs chairman, and Lawrence Summers, a Rubin aide who succeeded the treasury secretary before the bill was passed, engineered this legislation, which became law and which Hillary Clinton now has the effrontery to blame on Bernie Sanders.

The same Rubin-Summers wrecking crew had also destroyed the sensible restraints on Wall Street greed, implemented as the Glass-Steagall Act by the administration of Franklin Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression. Hillary Clinton defends the repeal of Glass-Steagall’s separation of commercial and investment banking, while Sanders wants it reinstated.

That repeal, as well as preventing any regulation of the toxic mortgage packages and swaps that still hobble the world economy and wiped out the fortunes of black and brown people with particular severity, is Bill Clinton’s horrid legacy, and it is one that his wife now attempts to blame on Bernie Sanders. Shame.

[Thinkingabout]

28. How can Sanders deny his votes, it is part of history, there is a record, a yes vote tells me he

supported the CFMA. There isn't any difference in Hillary owning the IWR vote and Sanders owning his votes.

[amborin]

29. HUGE & undeniable difference; Hillary GAVE uncoerced YES vote to Iraq;

[Jitter65]

32. Still blaming Hillary for Bills actions. Ain't going to work.

Just because her advisors advise one way doesn't mean she ill go the way of the advisors. Obama sure hasn't. Strong leaders can take advice, weigh it and make a decision. Sometimes you go with the advice, sometimes you don't.
I don't see where this is something really bad except that it is media fodder.

[cantbeserious]

36. Purchasing The Presidency Is Writ Large In The Direct And Indirect Ways Candidates Are Bribed

List Of - Publicly Disclosed - HRC Speeches And Fees - $ 21,667,000

A True One Percenter - Beholden To The Real Owners Of America - Oligarchs, Corporations And Banks

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-27/snowden-sums-presidential-campaign-just-one-tweet

[ladjf]

37. Her money is already in the bank with probably more to come if she is elected. nt