NYTimes Hillary Clinton op-ed: Reining in Wall Street.

[JaneyVee]

Last edited Mon Dec 7, 2015, 11:26 AM - Edit history (1)

Snip

My comprehensive plan has already won praise from progressives like Sherrod Brown and Barney Frank. Here’s what it would do.

First, we need to further rein in major financial institutions. My plan proposes legislation that would impose a new risk fee on dozens of the biggest banks — those with more than $50 billion in assets — and other systemically important financial institutions to discourage the kind of hazardous behavior that could induce another crisis. I would also ensure that the federal government has — and is prepared to use — the authority and tools necessary to reorganize, downsize and ultimately break up any financial institution that is too large and risky to be managed effectively. No bank or financial firm should be too big to manage.

My plan would strengthen the Volcker Rule by closing the loopholes that still allow banks to make speculative gambles with taxpayer-backed deposits. And I would fight to reinstate the rules governing risky credit swaps and derivatives at taxpayer-backed banks, which were repealed during last year’s budget negotiations after a
determined lobbying campaign by the banks.

My plan also goes beyond the biggest banks to include the whole financial sector. Some have urged the return of a Depression-era rule called Glass-Steagall, which separated traditional banking from investment banking. But many of the firms that contributed to the crash in 2008, like A.I.G. and Lehman Brothers, weren’t traditional banks, so Glass-Steagall wouldn’t have limited their reckless behavior. Nor would restoring Glass-Steagall help contain other parts of the “shadow banking” sector, including certain activities of hedge funds, investment banks and other non-bank institutions. My plan would strengthen oversight of these activities, too — increasing leverage and liquidity requirements for broker-dealers and imposing strict margin requirements on the kinds of short-term borrowing that also played a major role in spurring the financial crisis. We need to tackle excessive risk wherever it lurks, not just in the banks.

the rest: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/12/07/opinion/hillary-clinton-how-id-rein-in-wall-street.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0&referer=https://t.co/DBcsqQBG4y

[djean111]

1. Hillary's plan - great typo!!!!! - "Hillary Clinton op-ed: Reigning in Wall Street" n/t

[JaneyVee]

3. Where's the typo?

[djean111]

9. "Reign" instead of "rein".

Yes, she does, IMO, want to be queen of Wall Street.

[JaneyVee]

30. Thanks. Walking and typing. Auto correct strikes again.

[Betty Karlson]

10. Reigns are usually preceded by a coronation. eom

[Wilms]

16. And often don't end well.

[merrily]

8. LOL! Nice catch, djean111.

[CharlotteVale]

14. That jumped out at me too. Very appropriate.

[Live and Learn]

22. And the OP created that herself. Cute. nt

[merrily]

2. Just go down there and tell them to cut it out! That always works.

[JaneyVee]

4. Actually she put up bills a year before the meltdown.

[merrily]

6. Let me guess. Those bills never went anywhere.

[MaggieD]

12. Like all of Bernie's bills

So, odd that you would have that criticism, don't you think? Bernie probably has more bills that never went anywhere than anyone in congress.

[merrily]

15. Nope Bernie wrote or co-wrote substantive bills and amendment that became law. Only ceremonial

stuff written or co-written Hillary became law.

Thank heaven for re-naming a post office and remembering the anniversary of the American Revolution, though! Where would the country and its inhabitants be today if Hillary hadn't been all over those issues?

Once again, Hillary's supporters devote time and energy to proving Bernie better than Hillary and, once again, I suggest that y'all may not want to spend so much time and energy doing that.

[merrily]

20. P.S. Since bills her husband lobbied for and signed caused the 2008 meltdown,

she sure should have seen it coming.

[JaneyVee]

24. Balanced budget/surplus by 2012.

25 million jobs created. But you're gonna let Repubs off the hook? Are you saying the CRA caused a meltdown? Because nearly every economist agrees Steagall would have made no difference. Even Liz Warren made that claim.

[merrily]

26. See Reply 23 and also: "Most telling, though, is the reinvention of the Clinton Administration as a

as a halcyon time of progressive success. Bill Clinton’s record demonstrates, if anything, the extent of Reaganism’s victory in defining the terms of political debate and the limits of political practice. A recap of some of his administration’s greatest hits should suffice to break through the social amnesia. Clinton ran partly on a pledge of “ending welfare as we know it”; in office he both presided over the termination of the federal government’s sixty-year commitment to provide income support for the poor and effectively ended direct federal provision of low-income housing. In both cases his approach was to transfer federal subsidies — when not simply eliminating them — from impoverished people to employers of low-wage labor, real estate developers, and landlords. He signed into law repressive crime bills that increased the number of federal capital offenses, flooded the prisons, and upheld unjustified and racially discriminatory sentencing disparities for crack and powder cocaine. He pushed NAFTA through over strenuous objections from labor and many congressional Democrats. He temporized on his campaign pledge to pursue labor-law reform that would tilt the playing field back toward workers, until the Republican takeover of Congress in 1995 gave him an excuse not to pursue it at all. He undertook the privatization of Sallie Mae, the Student Loan Marketing Association, thereby fueling the student-debt crisis."

Much more at http://harpers.org/archive/2014/03/nothing-left-2/?single=1

[zalinda]

35. Bill Clinton got lucky

If it hadn't been for the Internet busting loose, those jobs wouldn't have been created. Absolutely HUGE amounts of money were sunk into the Internet during that period, and quite a few of those break out businesses are now gone, some lasted only a year or so. The Internet was a wild, wild west during his administration.

Z

[Thinkingabout]

5. Hillary understands what needs to happen on Wall Street, this is a good plan.

[Betty Karlson]

7. Quote: "But many of the firms that contributed to the crash in 2008,

like A.I.G. and Lehman Brothers, weren’t traditional banks, so Glass-Steagall wouldn’t have limited their reckless behavior."

Except that collaterised debt packages were traded between traditional banks, so that the absence of Glass-Steagall effectively allowed the unsanitary practices of AIG and Lehman to infect the rest of the financial sector.

Clinton's plan leaves NO FIRE WALL between small banking accounts & actual output (the real economy) and financial speculation (the virtual economy) and she brags about it as if this is a good thing. It is not.

It's just a fancy way of keeping the status quo, but now with more loopholes and better platitudes. No thanks.

[merrily]

23. It was not only repeal of Glass Steagall. It was the Commodities Futures Financial

Services Act of 2000--and the Clinton White House lobbied Democrats in Congress hard for both of them so that Bubba could later point to a so-called "veto-proof majority. Reality is, the only reason a veto-proof majority existed was that a Democratic White House lobbied hard to get it.

[Betty Karlson]

25. I know it wasn't JUST the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

But not re-instating Glass-Steagall is like building a big brick wall with a hole in the middle: it rather defeats the purpose of the rest of the wall.

Clinton's plan doesn't solve the problem, is my point.

[merrily]

27. Totally agree.

[Betty Karlson]

29. Glad to find myself on your side. eom

[merrily]

36. And vice versa.

[UglyGreed]

11. '

[Wilms]

18. That's not nice, UG!

Now, "cut it out". K?

[MaggieD]

13. K&R

[Cha]

17. "Hillary Clinton: How I’d Rein In Wall Street" And, she'll be doing it too..

[Betty Karlson]

21. Reigning in the name of Wall Street, more likely.

The Freudian slip in the OP is VERY telling.

[Live and Learn]

19. I thought this was satire. 'Cut it out'!

[ESKD]

28. OpEd has been ruined by just one word on its title.

[jeff47]

31. Next op-ed: George W Bush on navigating Middle East politics. (nt)

[bahrbearian]

32. Will he write that before or after Hilliary makes him Secretary of State .

She seems to like his foreign policies. Bomb Bomb Bomb

[jeff47]

33. Nah, she'll put Kissinger back in.

After all, she says she relied heavily on his advice during her time as Secretary of State.

Why settle for an incompetent moron when you can put in someone who is competent and just as evil?

[ljm2002]

34. Not good enough, Hillary...

...it's more tough talk that won't be backed up by a tough walk when the time comes.

Here are a few points that I found suspect:

My plan proposes legislation that would impose a new risk fee on dozens of the biggest banks — those with more than $50 billion in assets — and other systemically important financial institutions to discourage the kind of hazardous behavior that could induce another crisis.

I'm sure they are quivering in their boots. Probably this "risk fee" will simply replace the fines they already pay when caught engaging in illegal behavior.

I would also ensure that the federal government has — and is prepared to use — the authority and tools necessary to reorganize, downsize and ultimately break up any financial institution that is too large and risky to be managed effectively. No bank or financial firm should be too big to manage.

Note the turn of phrase here: "too big to manage" as distinguished from "too big to fail". See, when you recognize that an institution is too big to fail, you can break it up on that basis alone. If you instead use the standard of "too big to manage", that means that someone somewhere will have to prove that it's too big to manage. But any corporate banking shill could counter that easily by pointing to other, larger corporations (e.g. Walmart with its army of employees) and say if they're not too big to manage, how can you say we are? And ultimately, with this criterion in place, they can always agree to make changes in management, and of course such agreements would drag on for years and they would never be broken up.

When a firm pays a fine, I would make sure that the penalty cuts into executives’ bonuses, too.

Wow, that's gonna leave a mark. Note, these firms pay fines when they are caught in illegal behavior. So after saying that no executive should be "too big to jail", she goes on to say how really, really tough she will be by cutting into their damned bonuses. Color me not impressed.

There are some good proposals in there too, of course, although Hillary Clinton's long history with the financial sector and all of the large donations and speaking fees she has gotten from them lead me to doubt her enthusiasm in this area, and possibly her sincerity as well. And I'm not the only voter who feels that way.

[Walk away]

37. Much better and saner plan than Bernie's "Revolution"!

This is why Hillary's numbers and endorsements are so high. People want a Progressive, not a Socialist as POTUS!

[Betty Karlson]

38. "Socialist" doesn't carry much scare weight with people born after 1990.

[Walk away]

39. I'm not "scared" of Socialists. I just don't want one as my President.

I have no interest in Bernie's Revolution and neither do most Democrats.

[Betty Karlson]

40. Denmark had a socialist for prime-minister. The country is still one of

the most prosperous and well-organised nations in the world. I don't see the problem.

[Walk away]

42. Well then, if Bernie dosen't get elected then you have a good alternative!

[Betty Karlson]

43. I thought "Your country: love it or leave it" was the GOP slogan?

The Democratic Party usually goes with "Your country: change it or lose it".

[ibegurpard]

41. progressives like Barney Frank?

Lol
"Cut it out!"