January 25, 2014

Heartless Republican scum.

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.

* * * *

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.

This would be the "Republican" deregulation of financial markets that leftists love to crow about.

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.

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