It was 16 years ago when CFTC Chairwoman Brooksley Born warned about the dangers of unregulated, opaque derivatives and fought a brutal and lonely battle against the largest banks. Her goal was to do nothing more than have access to information, to study the depth of the risk exposure . . . . Ms. Born lost this principled battle. Time tested protections of regulated derivatives management that had served the country so well for more than 70 years . . . were dismantled when US President Bill Clinton signed into law the Commodity Modernization Act of 2000.This would be the "Republican" deregulation of financial markets that leftists love to crow about.* * * *
These new “laws” did not establish any new guidance but only served the purpose of unwinding previous laws. A key result was allowing the largest banks to literally operate without restriction or supervision. . . . The groundwork laid in the mid and late 1990s to let the banks write derivative insurance contracts without restriction or oversight [manifested] itself in 2007 and 2008 as the unregulated derivatives collapsed the world economy, which has yet to properly recover.
I salute Brooksley Born, someone who showed integrity.
Notes
[1] "At Davos: Paul Singer To Warn Of Derivatives Catastrophe." By Mark Melin, ValueWalk, 1/17/14.
No comments:
Post a Comment