The Dodd financial reform bill is beginning to scare executives. However, it is not necessarily scaring bankers or Wall Street fat cats. It is scaring motor cycle manufacturers, college presidents, retailers, car dealers, and even coffee shop executives. All of these people and more are waking up to the Dodd …
The New York Times reports this morning, “Politicians like nothing more than a convenient foil, and Democrats locked in a stubborn impasse with Republicans over new rules to govern Wall Street believe they have found a gold-plated one in Goldman Sachs. Democrats say the convergence of their push for an …
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 …
The Wall Street Journal reports that Barack Obama’s favorite capitalist, Warren Buffet, is seeking an exemption from Obama-endorsed derivatives rules for his insurance-and-everything conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway. Derivatives are risk-shifting financial contracts that Buffet infamously described as “weapons of financial mass destruction.” After the 2008 financial crisis, Buffet decided to join …
President Barack Obama’s favorite rhetorical device is to lecture the American people about what are and are not “legitimate” public policy arguments. So throughout the health care debate, President Obama insisted that it was “not legitimate” to claim that “a public option is somehow a Trojan horse for a single-payer …
Sponsors of derivatives “reform” legislation claim it will reduce costs to derivatives users. Just how more government regulation is supposed to reduce costs in the private sector has never been exactly clear, but discussion at Wednesday’s Senate Agriculture Committee mark-up of derivatives reform legislation revealed that the “reform” will cost …
There is no person more central to Washington’s bailouts of Wall Street than Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. As President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he oversaw the federal bailout of Bear Stearns and under former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Getihner designed the original bailout plan for the …
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 …
