Thursday, February 03, 2011
George Will on the debt crisis:He writes: [Rick Santorum] is, of course, correct that America's debt crisis is, at bottom, symptomatic of a failure of self-control, a fundamental moral failing. A moral failing! Not due to central bank decisions. It's a moral failing, which curiously was most pronounced in those countries with lax financial regulation.
posted by Quiddity at 2/03/2011 03:20:00 AM
10 comments
I'd say that the failure of self-control, the fundamental moral failing, was on the part of the government. It's not that they didn't have enough regulations, or that those regulations were laxly enforced. The problem was that they got rid of good regulations like Glass Steagall that put a firewall between commercial and investment banks and and replaced them with bad regulations, like the CRA. No one is accusing the government of laxly enforcing the CRA. If you wanted a mortgage, and had a body temperature above room temperature, you got your mortgage with the full force of federal regulation and law.
Both parties can take the blame for creating a regime of disasterous, misconceived financial regulation. It wasn't a lack of enforcement. It was a lack of regulating the things that needed to be regulated, and spending a lot of time and energy carefully regulating things that they shouldn't have been allowing to happen in the first place.
Gee, I wonder who voted in Glass Steagall. Please remind me, when did CRA go into effect and just how many of the mortgages that went south were part of it?
Yep, I agree it was the government that had the principal moral failing based upon lax enforcement. Absolutely nobody in the big banks did one thing wrong. All of them were completely morally pure and innocent of wrong-doing. It is the mortgagees who should have be in jail. Not the poor, pure bankers.
Enforcement of regulations can only work if it is in the president's budget and approved by congress.
Remember, Bush believed in self regulation of business.
jms blithered, The problem was that they got rid of good regulations like Glass Steagall that put a firewall between commercial and investment banks and and replaced them with bad regulations, like the CRA.
LOL. You've got the chronology completely wrong. CRA was passed in 1997. The final nail in the coffin of GS wasn't until the 1990s.
Whoops---typo. "1997" ==> "1977".
"jms blithered..."
Ah, give the poor guy a break. Cuttin' and pastin' right wing talking points is hard work! He doesn't have time to do any actual fact checking - only the reality-based community wastes its time on that nonsense!
To call Glass-Steagall 'good regulation' is definitely not a RW talking point. I was actually surprised to read that in post by jms. To true RWers Glass-Steagall is of the devil (i.e. FDR).
Didn't you know? FDR was a conservative. So was JFK. Everybody dead who did something useful was a conservative. But they have to be dead so they can't object to being tarred with that brush.
A tad off topic, George Will's WaPo column today on the role of the US with the situation in Egypt makes sense, for which he will no doubt be attacked by the neocons.
the rich effed up. now the poor have to be punished for it.
it's what jesus would have wanted.
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