| Raze said: Come on, use Ctrl-F and type "deregulation" if you don't want to read the whole article. Not just financial, but for the other industries too. Look what it did for them then, and the megapowers they've become since they were let off the leash. As for a flimsy link, here http://washingtonindependent.com/82632/clinton-faults-himself-for-financial-industry-deregulation I don't disagree that people screwed themselves over and lived irrationally, that's not the debate. You said, and I paraphrase, that we need more deregulation to make the economy better. History has shown, as provided through the before-mentioned links, that while some deregulation makes for immediate fixes, it has horrible results down the road. In the above link, is a brief blurb, an admission by Clinton, that his financial deregulation led to the creation of megabanks like BoA, who have recently just pulled a fast one on the Fed itself that threatens the entire financial structure of the United States. My point is simple, deregulation was the weapon that killed America, and the United States government was the one to pull the trigger. |
I never said we need deregulation to make the economy better. What I said is that specific government regulations contributed to the problem in a big way. For instance, when the Community Reinvestment Act said that, if a bank wants to participate in normal activities such as engaging in a merger or opening a new branch, it had better be loaning money to low income people (read: minorities), that paved the way for a lot of bad shit to happen. Ditto with Bush's "ownership society" initatives. So, if the government has regulations that are actively destructive, or it is just bad at enforcing existing regulations, then the answer cannot be simply MOAR REGULASHINZ.
Furthermore, a poll shows that fully half of the OWS protesters believe that TARP was necessary. So, to the extent that they have a coherent agenda at all, many of them are protesting something with which they agreed. Instead of yelling at Wall Street, they ought to take it up with Obama and Congress and demand to know why, if these banks which were "too big to fail" were prevented from failing, they weren't made not too big to fail in the future as a part of the bargain.
