Does the Obama Plan for Reforming Wall Street Measure Up?

[Crewleader]

Robert Reich

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Does the Obama Plan for Reforming Wall Street Measure Up?

In a word: No.

The plan doesn't stop stop bankers from making huge, risky bets with other peoples’ money. It does increase capital requirements and oversight, but it doesn't require bankers to take their pay in long-term stock options or warrants, and it doesn't even hint that banks should go back to being partnerships instead of publicly-held corporations.

All this means traders still have very incentive to place big and often wildly risky bets as long as the potential winnings are big enough, and top executives have very little incentive to monitor what traders are up to as long as the traders are collecting large commissions on the bets.

http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2009/06/does-obama-plan-for-reforming-wall.html?

[Sebastian Doyle]

1. If Obama really wanted to solve the economic problems

He'd lose Timmy the Keebler elf, Shittibank Summers and the rest of those Clintonista Clowns, and replace them with people like Reich who know what the fuck they're talking about.

[jgraz]

2. It's laughably bad

The fact that it resurrects the secondary market in sub-prime mortgages is disastrous. It does nothing to deal with CEO pay or other short-term incentives and it leaves the most dangerous credit derivatives almost completely unregulated.

The worst part is they don't even try to hide it. They're counting on us being too stupid or distracted to follow what's going on.

[truedelphi]

3. It is very reminiscent of the graph someone posted here

Last Week.

For his appearance before Congress, Geithner apparently had brought a graph of how the job market would look without the stimulus bill, and how the job market would look with it. And of course, even though he got what he wanted from Congress, we haven't gotten the jobs his graph predicted.

The other thing - he did not have a source for the graph. No source - just apparently a staffer who had a ruler and some magic markers!

Discussion on graph here -

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=114x65817