Wall Street Protests

[Raze]

badgenome said:

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.

Ah finally, we've come to an agreement.

As for regulations, yes, there are a LOT of bad moves more recently that caused the credit/housing mess, as you said above. My point on deregulation was more about what was done in the long-ago deregulation. How about this thought - price regulation for fixed market oil? For example, a price lock of $2.00/gallon for gasoline. When gas prices hit $3.00/gallon, oil companies post 300-400% profits. If they took a 50% hit in price, they'd still make 150%-200% profit, and the suggested regulation isn't asking for that much of a reduction.