Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) failed to end debate on Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-CT) financial regulation bill yesterday when two Democrats broke ranks to vote with conservatives. The Dodd bill is already a big government monstrosity, expanding powers for existing Washington regulators as well as creating and empowering new ones. But frightened by the defeat of Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) and the near defeat of Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Russ Feingold (D-WI) issued statements following their “no” voted demanding that the bill further increase the …
Senate Democrats secretly agree that Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s (D-AR) proposal to attempt to impose a complete separating on credit default swaps and credit providers (i.e. banks) makes no sense. But they’re too embarrassed to say so while Lincoln uses the proposal to wage a populist campaign for re-nomination against liberal Arkansas Lt. Governor Bill Halter. Now that Lincoln has been forced into a June 8 run-off against Halter, Lincoln’s Senate colleagues are looking for a quiet way to kill her swaps proposal. Banking Committee Chair Chris Dodd (D-CT) first proposed, and …
As debate on the Wall Street “Reform” bill winds down in the Senate, Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) is still pushing his ban on “naked” credit default swaps. We warned that the idea wouldn’t work. Now we have some real world experience with just such a proposal: Germany banned the practice in German financial markets Tuesday night, and stock prices fell in Germany and worldwide. Observers called the German ploy “an act of desperation and a refusal to address the fundamental problems at hand,” and warned that the move could cause …
Yesterday, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) told reporters about his financial regulation bill, “We’ve ended the ‘too big to fail’ debate. So no longer do I expect any argument to be made that this bill exposes the American taxpayer.” Really. Someone might want to tell Sen. Dodd that in other news yesterday, Freddie Mac announced that it lost another $6.7 billion in the first quarter of 2010 and therefore needed another $10.6 billion in cash from U.S. taxpayers. Since formally nationalizing Freddie in 2008, the federal government has already spent $50.7 …
As the Senate moves closer to another cloture vote on Senator Dodd’s legislation, we are again reminded of the several flaws found in the Dodd-Frank approach to financial regulatory reform. Beginning with the rescue of investment bank Bear Stearns in the spring of 2008, the Federal government has committed trillions of taxpayer dollars to institutions like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Citigroup and Bank of America, out of fear that the demise of any of these “too big to fail” institutions would trigger a systemic crisis and collapse of the …
The latest word today is that the GOP is standing down from its standoff over the Senate’s financial-regulation bill. Specifically, word is that Republican leaders will now let the bill proceed to the floor, having received assurances that provisions for creditor bailouts will be removed. That’s not an insignificant improvement, despite the fact that President Obama has said that it is not “legitimate” to raise the issue of bailouts. But no one should think this bill is fixed. Far from it: Beyond the creditor bailout, I’ve counted at least 13 …
Months after making an ill-fated stand for the “Cornhusker Kickback” in health care legislation, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) has again put himself in the spotlight. Yesterday he was the lone Democrat to vote against moving forward on the Senate’s financial regulation bill. Nelson claimed in a statement, “We need to regulate Wall Street without doing harm to Main Street, and I’m hearing from Main Street businesses in Nebraska that have concerns about the current bill adversely impacting them.” But given his past attempts to extract special favors for Nebraska, not …
Conservatives say the Dodd Finance Bill means Wall Street Bailouts Forever. Progressives say the Dodd bill “makes bailouts impossible.” Who’s right? Well lets ask Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner who described the bill this way in The Washington Post: The Senate bill gives the government the authority to wind down the firm with no exposure to the taxpayer. No more bailouts. Instead, we will have a bankruptcy-like regime where equityholders will be wiped out and the assets will be sold. “No more bailouts.” Sounds nice. But what does “bankruptcy-like regime” mean?
In mid-October 2008, at the height of the Presidential campaign, Heritage Foundation analyst Rea Hederman began receiving emails alerting him that he was a star in a new multimillion-dollar ad campaign for then-candidate Barack Obama. The ads claimed that Hederman believed the middle class would be better off under the Obama tax plan. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In fact, Hederman’s analysis of the Obama tax plan found the exact opposite: that Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) tax plan would produce twice as many jobs as then-candidate Obama’s …
Speaking yesterday to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Fourth Annual Capital Markets Summit, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Neal S. Wolin made the case for Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-CT), including this: This should not be a partisan or ideological debate. As David John of the Heritage Foundation has said, “Taxpayers should never again be forced repeatedly to bail out financial services firms like AIG because a company poses a risk to the entire financial system and regulators lack the necessary tools to close the company safely.” We are happy to …
