The deregulation of financial institutions in the 1990s has been cited as one major reason for our current economic crisis. Now, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geigner wants to enact some serious regulatory reform to try to rein in the reckless greed.
Good.
Geitner has come under fire lately over his agenda, and there is no real consensus amongst top economists over whether his plan for dealing with "toxic" assets will work.
But I am confident that he is right about one thing: New regulatory measures are a necessity.
After all, Alan Greenspan himself has admitted that he had "put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton [i.e., unregulated] mortgage lending."
Still, while regulation may appear to be an obvious necessity at this point, one hurdle remains: Congress
Will they go along with it? Or will the Wall Street lobby win this battle too, as more and more Americans lose their homes and their jobs every day?
The class war continues.
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