Among the 500 odd new regulations it imposes, the financial bill, all 2,300 pristine, unread pages of it, has just been passed by the Senate. As we surmised in April, and Bloomberg now confirms, the thing will,
” … create a mechanism for liquidating failing financial firms whose collapse could roil markets, a council of regulators to police firms for threats to the economic system and a consumer bureau at the Federal Reserve to monitor banks for credit-card and mortgage lending abuses. It also expands oversight of executive compensation and derivatives, contracts whose value is derived from stocks, bonds, loans, currencies and commodities.”
“Nowhere in the final bill will you see even a pretense of rolling back the endless federal incentives and mandates to extend credit, particularly mortgages, to those who cannot afford to pay their loans back,” notes Mark A. Calabria of the Cato Institute. “After all, the popular narrative insists that Wall Street fat cats must be to blame for the credit crisis. Despite the recognition that mortgages were offered to unqualified individuals and families, banks will still be required under the Dodd-Frank bill to meet government-imposed lending quotas.”
The title of this post is borrowed from the aptly titled article in the WSJ, which warns that “the legislation hands off to 10 regulatory agencies the discretion to write hundreds of new rules governing finance. Rather than the bill itself, it will be this process—accompanied by a lobbying blitz from banks—that will determine the precise contours of this new landscape … ”
The Managerial State in full force.
There were 60 YEAs and 39 NAYs.
The Republicans that must be thrown into the brier patch are Susan Collins, slow Olympia Snowe, and beefcake Scott Brown.
