Have lessons been learned on Wall Street?
President Barack Obama went to Wall Street on the one-year anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse to make a push for greater regulation of the financial industry.
He’s proposing creating a “resolution authority” to end the concept that some firms are “too big to fail.” And Obama is hoping that financial regulatory reform gets passed this year.
Obama had some words for those who defend the status quo or argue for less regulation. “There will be those who engage in revisionist history or have selective memories, and don’t seem to recall what we just went through last year,” he said.
Some critics say reform is needed, but Obama’s plan is just not the right prescription for what ails the financial industry.
Mark Calabria, director of financial regulation studies at Cato Institute, says Obama’s plan would “make bailouts a permanent feature of the regulatory landscape.”
He argues that “real reform” would be fixing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the tax code and monetary policy, and that implementing Obama’s plan could mean the next financial crisis would be bigger than the current one.
What do you think? Is Obama’s plan the fix needed for Wall Street, or something else?
from MediaFile:
Presidential candidates: Love ‘em and Lehman
Media coverage of the U.S. presidential race has not so much cast Democratic candidate Barack Obama in a favorable light as it has portrayed Republican opponent John McCain in a negative one.
That' s the verbatim conclusion of a new report from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism that analyzes the way the press has covered the campaign.
The report shows that negative stories about Arizona Sen. McCain has been decidedly unfavorable and has worsened over time, with negative stories about him outnumbering favorable Obama stories by more than three to one.
That and many more interesting details are available in the 35-page report, but what caught our attention, being a business-oriented news service, was a graph charting the tone of press coverage devoted to both candidates and how it changed after the bankruptcy filing of investment bank Lehman Brothers.
When Lehman collapsed, the percentage of negative stories about Obama plunged from 30 percent that week in September to just under 10 percent a week later. It scooted back up to 45 percent by early October and has been down again since then. Negative stories about McCain eased to 50 percent from... well, just a bit over 50 percent. Since then it's surged to nearly 70 percent.
After Lehman collapsed, the reported noted that McCain tried to seize the initiative on the economic crisis.
According to the report:
While there is no doubt that media bias is a real factor out there, it really is also possible that negative stories rise about candidates who have more negative attributes, run a more negative campaign, and have generally made more mistakes or pursued bad policies.
Sometimes if it looks like a duck….
from MediaFile:
Presidential candidates: Love ‘em and Lehman
Media coverage of the U.S. presidential race has not so much cast Democratic candidate Barack Obama in a favorable light as it has portrayed Republican opponent John McCain in a negative one.
That' s the verbatim conclusion of a new report from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism that analyzes the way the press has covered the campaign.
The report shows that negative stories about Arizona Sen. McCain has been decidedly unfavorable and has worsened over time, with negative stories about him outnumbering favorable Obama stories by more than three to one.
That and many more interesting details are available in the 35-page report, but what caught our attention, being a business-oriented news service, was a graph charting the tone of press coverage devoted to both candidates and how it changed after the bankruptcy filing of investment bank Lehman Brothers.
When Lehman collapsed, the percentage of negative stories about Obama plunged from 30 percent that week in September to just under 10 percent a week later. It scooted back up to 45 percent by early October and has been down again since then. Negative stories about McCain eased to 50 percent from... well, just a bit over 50 percent. Since then it's surged to nearly 70 percent.
After Lehman collapsed, the reported noted that McCain tried to seize the initiative on the economic crisis.
According to the report:
While there is no doubt that media bias is a real factor out there, it really is also possible that negative stories rise about candidates who have more negative attributes, run a more negative campaign, and have generally made more mistakes or pursued bad policies.
Sometimes if it looks like a duck….
Wall street has not learned anything other than the pretense of humility. It is a collection of greedy, short termist individuals with a mandate only for self aggrandisement.
Exactly like the administration that is proposing to teach it a lesson, the administration before it that failed to spot the crisis (of which a number of advisors and Fed members have tennure in both administrations) and the next administration.
The government has encouraged and colluded with Wall Street due to the tax take and Wall Street has encouraged and colluded with the government due to the potential to make that tax take.
We will be going down this road again.