Why we can’t let this financial reform bill be our only response to the economic crisis

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:




Taking Financial Reform into Our Own Hands
Why we can’t let this financial reform bill be our only response to the economic crisis.

by Stacy Mitchell
posted Jul 15, 2010


With the now-expected passage of the financial reform bill, giant banks see a golden opportunity to finally put the financial crisis, along with their culpability for wrecking our economy, in the rearview mirror.

"We are very pleased to have this certainty and closure," declared Steve Bartlett when the House-Senate conference committee had finished negotiating. Bartlett is the president of the Financial Services Roundtable, a powerful big bank lobbying group that would like nothing more than to make this legislation the one and only policy response to the banking system's catastrophic failure.

It's up to all of us to make sure that it is not.

The economic crisis is not over, and the rot and malfunctioning at the heart of our banking system remains. Indeed, since the collapse, giant banks have only grown bigger and more powerful, and less responsive to the needs of the real economy. While the financial reform bill includes several worthwhile measures, it will not set the industry right or entail a fundamental alteration of its scale and structure.

It leaves us, at best, only modestly less vulnerable to another meltdown. And it fails utterly to confront a deeper problem: even in the best of times, our banking system does not serve us very well. The two main reasons to have banks, after all, are to facilitate the growth of businesses and help families build assets and financial security. Yet, its hard to find more than a trace of these core functions on the balance sheets of the giant banks that now dominate the industry. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/taking-financial-reform-into-our-own-hands

[xchrom]

1. ...

'The two main reasons to have banks, after all, are to facilitate the growth of businesses and help families build assets and financial security. Yet, its hard to find more than a trace of these core functions on the balance sheets of the giant banks that now dominate the industry. .......'

the bigger the banks are and the fewer the banks are has moved us all closer to catastrophe not further from it.

[midnight]

2. The Jobless Recovery feat. Senator Sherrod Brown

http://sgi.newamerica.net/