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Sunday, July 19, 2015

Barney Frank Defends Dodd-Frank Against Elizabeth Warren

     Great to hear from Frank again. I'm also happy to defending his law that is so maligned among not just the Right but many on the Left that say it doesn't go far enough. They said that same thing about Obamacare. You had people like Jane Hamsher threatening to primary anyone-even Bernie Sanders-that didn't simply say 'reset' back in 2010.

   It was tough not to notice that firebaggers were saying the same thing about ACA that the GOP was saying: 'This bill is too fundamentally flawed to be improved. We have to go back to the drawing board to get a better deal. '

  What this ignores is that the ACA is set up in a way that allows states to improve on it. Vermont has made it single payer. Other states can too if the public wants this.

   The Obamacare haters just remind us of Dr.Frances Towsned's implacable opposition to Social Security in the 30s-which ended up including Father Coughlin of the extreme Right and Huey Long of the extreme Left.

    It's pointed out that the ACA doesn't cover everyone but it covers a lot more than SS covered when it started-SS covered only 5% it's first year.

  We also see the fruits of making your main focus getting rid of Democrats who you hold to not be progressive enough-as I've said before I prefer 'liberal' to 'progressive'' but that's' me-rather than Republicans.

   http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/07/stephen-king-governor-lapage-should-do.html

   http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/06/how-to-drive-emoprogs-crazy-say.html

   Now Frank is pushing back against leftists who knock Dodd-Frank including  the pious Elizabeth Warren who alone in the world is pure in virtue and absent of vice.

  "When reminded of their views, Mr Frank, 75, a famously pugnacious former Democratic congressman, says: “Some people think the earth’s flat.”

   "He is adamant that Dodd-Frank ended “too big to fail” for one simple reason: it prohibits government bailouts of insolvent institutions. But he concedes that a future Congress could reauthorise such rescues by changing the law in another crisis."

   "President Bill Clinton signed a bill to repeal Glass-Steagall in 1999 and Mr Frank says the idea of a 21st century version is misguided. “It doesn’t solve some of the essential problems.”

   "Reclining in an armchair at the home of a friend near Capitol Hill, he says the failure to regulate derivatives did more to precipitate the crisis than the repeal of Glass-Steagall, whose restrictions would not have stopped the cataclysmic collapse of Lehman Brothers, an investment bank.

 “[Glass-Steagall] is a statement that the banks are too big and we should break them up. I don’t think size alone is the issue. Canada does very well with a handful of big banks.”


 I will say this. While our handling of the crisis may not have been optimal it was much closer than in the EU. At least here we put the blame on irresponsible lending while in the EU it was on irresponsible spending. 

 http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6013.html

 http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5965.html

 http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6069.html

 It's interesting how much argument this simple point got Steve Randy Waldman. Many conservatives are deeply offended that what these debts that Greece is supposed to pay amount to are actually bailouts for big German and French banks.

    


  

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