Did Brown’s win spark Obama’s war on Wall Street?
Courtesy of Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns
That’s the gist of yesterday’s post by James Pethoukoukis. The column says:
A historic victory, really. It is hard to overstate just how “blue” a state Massachusetts is.
Obama won it by 26 percentage points in 2008. Until now the state’s 10 U.S House members, two U.S. senators and all statewide officers were Democrats. The state hasn’t had a Republican U.S. senator since 1979. And, of course, the seat Brown captured had been held by the late Edward Kennedy since 1962…Financial reform legislation was already likely to get milder rather than stronger. But not so the rhetoric. Unable to trumpet the economy, hitting Wall
Street is one of the few political bullets Democrats have left.So expect the Obama administration to go all out for the bank tax with increasingly harsh words for big financial
institutions . Democrats may also be more willing to consider controversial proposals banks hate, like letting judges rework mortgages.
And this seems to be exactly what is occurring. I see this latest salvo as confirmation that my “incomplete” grade on Obama’s economic policy is the right one. Is Obama all hat and no cattle and doing this just because of voter anger as Marshall Auerback recently said? Or are the Volcker-backed reforms going to be real ones which for which Obama also pushes 100% win, lose or draw?
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