Monday, Oct 27th
Last update06:50:11 AM GMT
Economic Glance
Christopher Cox, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and a longtime proponent of deregulation, acknowledged on Friday that the voluntary supervisory program of Wall Street’s largest investment banks had contributed to the global financial crisis and abruptly shut the program down.
The agency’s oversight responsibilities will largely shift to the Federal Reserve.
Under the government plan, the long-gone CEOs would not have to give anything back, said Steven W. Adamske, a spokesman for the House Committee on Financial Services. He said there was no constitutional way to recoup pay retroactively.
Meanwhile, the former CEOs who accepted fat severance packages from the banks at the heart of the crisis are long gone.
The US government will own every house that is foreclosed on as well as those where people simply decide to walk away.
Questions like these are why Treasury Secretary Paulson and Chairman Ben Bernanke want you to rush passage of this bill. Both want you to pass Paulson's bill before you have time to think.
“Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency,” the original draft of the proposed bill says.
And with those words, the Treasury secretary — whoever that may be in a few months — will be with vested with perhaps the most incredible powers ever bestowed on one person over the economic and financial life of the nation. It is the financial equivalent of the Patriot Act.
Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.’s $700 billion proposal to bail out Wall Street is both the biggest rescue and the most amazing power grab in the history of the American economy.
Huffington Post writer threatened by neo-con bloggers after urging readers to remember Prescott Bush's Fascist "Business Plot"
A reporter for the left leaning alternative news website The Huffington Post has been attacked by neo-con bloggers and phony right-wing patriots after pointing out that the current financial crisis is part of an intentional coup to transfer unprecedented power to the Executive Branch and place public funds in the hands of the global corporate elite.
Spitzer's omen went further to note that not only did the White House do nothing, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye after 50 state Attorneys General and many legislative attempts failed to halt the worst of the predatory lending excesses.
The AGs and their banking superintendents fought the Bush Administration's use of a Civil War era banking provision which established federal preemption of all state predatory lending laws and the new rules which emasculated state consumer protections from national banks.
Making the rounds on the Sunday morning talk shows, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson repeatedly said today's financial problems were long in the making. He should know. He was part of the Gold Rush that has brought the global financial system to the brink of collapse.
Paulson presided over one of the most profitable runs on Wall Street as chairman and chief executive officer of investment banking titan Goldman Sachs & Co. from 1999 until President Bush nominated him on May 30, 2006 to take over the Treasury Department.
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