What Republicans Are Really Saying

Republicans hate regulation so they will do anything and everything to dismantle regulations.  According to the Republican philosophy, we don’t need to regulation green house gases.  And Pat Toomey, the “Wall Street Warrior”, while serving on the House Banking Committee, helped write a resolution which lead to the repeal of parts of the Glass-Steagall Act that protected American’s financial investments.

Toomey’s first order of business as a freshman congressman: getting some good committee work. His Wall Street credentials—as well as the Republican majority—helped him score a seat on the House Banking Committee, where he sits on the Capital Markets, Securities and Government Sponsored Enterprises subcommittee as well as the Domestic and International Monetary Policy subcommittee. Toomey has already helped draft House Resolution 10, a proposal to roll back some of the Glass-Steagall legislation of the 1930s. Not surprisingly, Toomey is virulently opposed to unnecessary regulation. “The trend in deregulation, beginning in the early 1980s, is one of the biggest reasons for the sustained economic expansion,” he says. “I would like to see us continue to deregulate on many fronts, including the financial services industry.”

And what of the much-ballyhooed hedge fund regulation talk emanating from Washington lately? “It’s not clear to me that the problem with Long-Term Capital Management requires new regulation,” he says. “I think we need to continue to work on understanding what really happened there and what the magnitude of the threat to the infrastructure of our financial services industry was. Frankly, I think that the outcome was appropriate. The equity investors lost everything—and under the circumstances that had to happen—but the bailout essentially worked. I would be very leery about, and I will resist, any effort to impose inappropriate regulations as a knee-jerk reaction to what was a big problem but was essentially solved.”

Read more about Toomey and his Wall Street connections here.

The bottom line is this:  Republicans are against regulations (Banks, Oil/Gas Industries).  However, when deregulation creates problems (Bank Failures, Oil/Gas accidents, pollution), then Republicans want the taxpayers to bailout the banks and pay for the environmental clean up.

Pat Toomey is just another Republican that supports deregulation and he would have voted “Yea”, in favor of the bank bailouts.  After all, Toomey would not have wanted to place any hardships on his friends in the banking industry or on Wall Street.

Obama to the Rescue – Update X 2

While John McCain is suddenly pretending that he is concerned about ordinary Americans by suspending his campaign and running off to Washington DC for photo-ops, Barack Obama is keeping a cool head and staying out of the way of the current economic negotiations. Obama said that he will go to Washington DC to vote or if Congress or the President requests his presence sooner. Senator Obama has also spoken with Paulson and Congressional leaders daily.

President Bush requested a meeting with both McCain and Obama and the leaders from both parties in Congress. The news reported that this meeting is basically to explain the current situation to both presidential candidates and to get their input into the proposed bail out.

Now that I got all that information out of the way, let’s look at the records. Everyone is aware that John McCain is a huge supporter of deregulation. Even Sarah Palin was lost for words when she couldn’t provide Katie Couric with any example of what John McCain has done for de-regulation of Wall Street.

During the 110th Congress, John McCain never sponsored a banking bill. Out of the 38 bills sponsored by John McCain, not even one of these bills have been referred to the Banking panel. Compare this to 5 of the 130 measures offered by Barack Obama which were referred to the Banking Committee.

Obama’s legislation calls for bolstering housing assistance for veterans, amending the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 to provide shareholders with an advisory vote on executive compensation, halting mortgage transactions that promote fraud, authorizing local and state governments to crack down on companies that invest in Iran’s energy sector and authorizing a pilot program to prevent at-risk veterans from becoming homeless. (excerpt from The Hill)

Off topic… during Wednesday’s speech to the American people, President George W Bush blamed the Clinton administration for this Wall Street mess. Bush said that the problem started 10 years ago which would mean that it started while Bill Clinton was President. I beg to differ on this… this Wall Street mess was started by “Mr Deregulation” and that would be President Ronald Reagan.

Never trust a Republican with your money.

UPDATE:
Read the latest text of the bail-out plan here, at the Wall Street Journal.

UPDATE 2:

You can’t make this stuff up… unbelievable. Read and watch the videos at Tirg Caps.

Wall Street Shuffle

There certainly has been a lot of shuffling on Wall Street this week.  Made me think of this song by 10 CC