What do you think about Obama’s financial proposals?
Here is the latest on President Obama’s financial-regulation proposals from Associated Press writer Jim Kuhnhenn.
The debate is just beginning in Congress.
Do you think the government is getting too involved in the economy? Or given what has happened over the past year, do you think it’s the right move?
Tell us what you think about the site
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7 comments Add your comment
OBSUC
June 17th, 2009
2:41 pm
q#1–yes
q#2– no
hegelian71
June 17th, 2009
2:43 pm
way too much control… their existing levers of power were rendered useless in this fiasco, as well as Katrina, as well as the TRILLION dollars missing from the pentagon which was announced 1 day before 911 then swept under the rug oh so easily thereafter. Let the big companies fail, and the investors will buy them up at a true market price thereafter, but DONT let the govt buy them, then put US on the hook for billions of bailout dollars (IOU’s) just before systematically dismantling the company piece by piece…selling it to China and other countries… wake up people– this is crony capitalism and the FED is a bogus, PRIVATE entity only in existence since 1913…Noticeably enough, that is right before our BIGGEST depression in history, followed by systematic booms and bust cycles and we buy the bust cycle as a legit excuse to give them more power… Are we stupid or what..? This is the hegelian dialectic in action decade after decade…
Murphy
June 17th, 2009
3:02 pm
How about regulating Fannie Mae? They still allow 3.5% down payment, don’t they? That was the crux of the housing crisis.
One regulation of the mortgage industry is all that is required: demand 20% down payment, as used to be the norm.
RealityKing
June 17th, 2009
3:14 pm
If you need government for common sense then your in deep dodo no matter how well Obama reads from his teleprompter.
Alton E. Drew
June 17th, 2009
9:21 pm
Adding more regulation to the financial markets is like putting salt and pepper on roadkill. For the past two years, the government, the press, and the financial community have blamed the meltdown in the financial markets on consumers, particularly those who defaulted on sub-prime mortgage payments. In addition, data shows that the decline in our nation’s income has been due to declines in personal consumption and business investment in plant and equipment. Today’s financial regulatory restructuring plan, announced this afternoon by Mr. Obama, has no connection to economic growth. Creating a new consumer protection agency has nothing to do with boosting GDP or lowering the unemployment rate.
Alton Drew
http://www.altondrew.com
fair tax
June 18th, 2009
11:13 am
Obama Sin Laden. nuff said.
Dale B. Halling
June 19th, 2009
5:39 pm
Obama’s Proposed Sweeping Financial Regulation: What Can We Learn from SOX (Sarbanes Oxley)
Sarbanes Oxley is very expensive: including enormous direct ($80 Billion per year) and indirect costs to our economy and to innovation. It has not met its goals of improving the quality of auditing or preventing fraud. Nor have any of the benefits of these costs materialized. Public companies have not experienced lower capital costs, investors have not been protected from fraud and there has not been faster economic growth due to more efficient allocation of resources. The effects of this law include fewer public companies, fewer companies going public, more companies choosing to go public in foreign markets, absurdly high auditing expenses and a significant decrease in risk capital.
Interestingly, a number of econometric studies of the effectiveness of the SEC and securities laws before and after Sarbanes Oxley have shown no net effect on investor returns. According to Liu et al. “we find that the conditional mean and variance of monthly total real stock returns were no different during 1940-2007 than during 1871-1925. Consequently, recent claims by high ranking government officials that stock market “stabilization” requires increased federal regulation implies greater faith in this method of protecting investors than is supported by the evidence.” What these studies do not account for is the lost opportunity costs due to all the securities laws. At least in the case of Sarbanes Oxley, the opportunity costs most likely far outweigh the direct costs.
For more information see:
Sarbanes Oxley – The Medicine is worse than the Disease: Part 1 Background (http://hallingblog.com/2009/06/17/sarbanes-oxley-%e2%80%93-the-medicine-is-worse-than-the-disease-part-1-background/)
Sarbanes Oxley – The Medicine is worse than the Disease: Part 2 (http://hallingblog.com/2009/06/18/sarbanes-oxley-%e2%80%93-the-medicine-is-worse-than-the-disease-part-2/)