Thursday, August 15, 2013

Are you saying ... Congress Doesn't Know What the Frock it is Doing?

Yet four years after the end of the Great Recession, and three years after the passage of the financial-reform legislation, America's megabanks are even bigger. Wall Street is more concentrated and the financial sector is more politically powerful than ever before, and there is little evidence that the most important lessons from the 2008 financial crisis have been taken to heart. What happened?

The gravest of the many problems with Dodd-Frank is that the law is based in a fundamental misunderstanding of how and why the megabanks it seeks to tame grew so large and complex in the first place. That growth was caused not by an unregulated market spun out of control, but by a set of disastrous federal policies. By repeatedly bailing out banks deemed too essential or too interconnected to fail, the federal government has incentivized - and even facilitated - the consolidation and astronomical expansion of the big banks. The certainty of a government backstop has provided the largest banks with a significant competitive advantage in the marketplace, which has created an artificial incentive for massive growth and risk-taking that is detrimental to the financial system.
http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/taming-the-megabanks

It's just disgusting.

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