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And, the big banks will be playing with our money ....
.... again.
This is such spectacularly bad legislation it's hard to overstate ....
Democratic pushback to a Wall Street giveaway hidden in a massive budget deal approached a breaking point Wednesday morning, with minority leader Nancy Pelosi casting doubt on her caucus’s willingness to support the omnibus bill unless Republicans agreed to remove the provision.
If the budget deal passed as-is, it would be a huge victory for big banks and would undermine recent attempts to protect taxpayers from the kind of risky financial bets that crashed the economy just six years ago. Congress must pass some kind of budget before midnight Thursday to avoid a government shutdown.
Citibank and other firms have been trying for years to weaken the Dodd-Frank financial reform act, which lawmakers passed after the collapse in an effort to stamp out endemic mismanagement and lax oversight in the financial industry. They’ve had limited success, largely by convincing regulators to delay implementation of some of the act’s provisions. But now Wall Street seems to have found the perfect vehicle for beginning to dismantle it in earnest: a giant budget bill that both parties are desperate to pass before the end of the week.
At issue is the “swaps push-out” rule, which requires banks to move derivatives trading out of taxpayer-backed subsidiaries. Derivatives are risky financial instruments that contributed to the 2008 crash. Allowing banks to conduct those trades on the assumption that taxpayers would bail them out if the deals went sour was not only bad for taxpayers; it also raised the value of the trades and thus effectively acted as a subsidy for the banks. Financial institutions, obviously, weren’t thrilled with the new rule. In 2013, lobbyists for Citigroup gave lawmakers a proposal to exempt a wide array of derivatives, and it subsequently appeared in a bill approved by a House committee that year.
On Tuesday, Citigroup’s measure was slipped deep within a budget bill that runs to nearly 1,500 pages. Republican Representative Jeb Hensarling, chair of the House Financial Services Committee, pushed it, but as his committee counterpart Maxine Waters noted in a statement, some Democrats are also “using critical legislation that is necessary to keep our government open as an opportunity to ram through harmful deregulation.” Waters referred to the budget bill as “a huge gift for Wall Street’s largest banks.”
http://www.thenation.com/blog/192497/congress-poised-hand-wall-street-huge-victory#
.... again.
This is such spectacularly bad legislation it's hard to overstate ....
Democratic pushback to a Wall Street giveaway hidden in a massive budget deal approached a breaking point Wednesday morning, with minority leader Nancy Pelosi casting doubt on her caucus’s willingness to support the omnibus bill unless Republicans agreed to remove the provision.
If the budget deal passed as-is, it would be a huge victory for big banks and would undermine recent attempts to protect taxpayers from the kind of risky financial bets that crashed the economy just six years ago. Congress must pass some kind of budget before midnight Thursday to avoid a government shutdown.
Citibank and other firms have been trying for years to weaken the Dodd-Frank financial reform act, which lawmakers passed after the collapse in an effort to stamp out endemic mismanagement and lax oversight in the financial industry. They’ve had limited success, largely by convincing regulators to delay implementation of some of the act’s provisions. But now Wall Street seems to have found the perfect vehicle for beginning to dismantle it in earnest: a giant budget bill that both parties are desperate to pass before the end of the week.
At issue is the “swaps push-out” rule, which requires banks to move derivatives trading out of taxpayer-backed subsidiaries. Derivatives are risky financial instruments that contributed to the 2008 crash. Allowing banks to conduct those trades on the assumption that taxpayers would bail them out if the deals went sour was not only bad for taxpayers; it also raised the value of the trades and thus effectively acted as a subsidy for the banks. Financial institutions, obviously, weren’t thrilled with the new rule. In 2013, lobbyists for Citigroup gave lawmakers a proposal to exempt a wide array of derivatives, and it subsequently appeared in a bill approved by a House committee that year.
On Tuesday, Citigroup’s measure was slipped deep within a budget bill that runs to nearly 1,500 pages. Republican Representative Jeb Hensarling, chair of the House Financial Services Committee, pushed it, but as his committee counterpart Maxine Waters noted in a statement, some Democrats are also “using critical legislation that is necessary to keep our government open as an opportunity to ram through harmful deregulation.” Waters referred to the budget bill as “a huge gift for Wall Street’s largest banks.”
http://www.thenation.com/blog/192497/congress-poised-hand-wall-street-huge-victory#
