Obama is Bush part 3

New Regulatory Changes? Now?

What makes you think this financial crisis was brought about by "insufficient regulation"? Its one thing when late night comedians render silly opinions like that, but if you are going to be an author on Seeking Alpha, you really need to be a lot more informed.

Without doing any research into regulatory structure: at the Federal level, we have a Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the FDIC, the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Housing and Urban Development (which regulates numerous mortgage programs), the FDIC, and lets not forget about both houses of Congress having a financial services committee that is supposed to watch broad industry trends and supervise the regulatory agencies above. On top of all that, we have the FBI and Department of Justice that are supposed to investigate financial fraud.

All the states have banking commissions, and many have securities regulators. All of them have attorney generals who supposedly investigate financial fraud.

How can you possibly claim this is "insufficient regulation"??? Did you even think about what you were writing before you wrote it???

I think you meant to say we have ***ineffective regulation*** .... because there is no way a halfway intelligent person could argue we don't have enough regulation.

Congress, just for example, actively intervened at every federal regulatory agency and insisted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac expand lending programs to poor borrowers -- neglecting to examine if poor borrowers were credit worthy and underserved (which would argue for FNM/FRE involvement) or if poor borrowers were simply unable to afford a home (which would be a perfectly legitimate reason why they wouldnt get a mortgage). Congress didnt ask and didn't care -- they wanted lending whether it made financial sense or not.

They even went so far as to appoint Franklin Raines, a politician with no banking background, as CEO of Fannie Mae... That appointment was done by Bill Clinton-- Bush has made more than enough bad decisions on his own without being blamed for the bad decisions of others.

We have plenty of regulations in this country -- but they are too often subverted by the regulators themselves.