Stupidity Bites HARD: Dodd and Frank
by ilene - July 11th, 2009 5:22 pm
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Stupidity Bites HARD: Dodd and Frank
Courtesy of Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker
These two are the "banking regulatory chiefs" in Congress of course; Dodd in the Senate and Frank in the House.
Both have steadfastly stood beside the banks through this crisis, especially the really-big banks that have given millions of dollars in campaign contributions.
The same banks that lobbied hard to "reform" bankruptcy so you cannot file Chapter 7 any more when you go bankrupt and stick lenders with the bad lending decisions they made of their own free will. That is, your credit and financial life is ruined, but theirs (which should also be ruined) is not.
The same banks that connived with Congress and The Federal Reserve to get the last pieces of Glass-Steagall repealed – the law that, had it been present, would have prevented nearly all of this crisis.
The same banks that (Citi-cough-cough) got Alan Greenspan to approve a merger with Travelers that Greenspan knew was illegal at the time it was consummated – a merger that was then retroactively made legal with passage of Gramm-Leach-Bliley.
The same banks that lobbied to get an exemption from bucket-shop laws and insurance regulation (indeed, any regulation) for credit-default swaps.
The same banks that, post-ENRON when we all learned about the outright fraudulent accounting enabled by "off-balance sheet" games, not only kept doing it but increased the size of such ventures.
And more importantly, the same banks that lobbied hard this spring to get an exemption from mark-to-market accounting for the "assets" they hold on their books – an exemption they were in fact using without having it, as I will shortly illustrate.
Well now Doddering Dodd and "I’ve never been frank" Frank are asking for the impossible:
Today, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank asked the heads of U.S. banking regulators to look into whether their companies are carrying home-equity loans at “potentially inflated values,” which “may contribute to resistance on the part of servicers to negotiate the disposition of these liens.”
Most of these loans are in fact worth nothing!
Here’s the understatement of the year from the same article:
“It is
Tags: bankruptcy reform, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Congress, Federal Reserve, Glass-Steagall
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