Nocera: Financial Reform Bill is Perfect – If You’re a Bank
by ilene - June 6th, 2010 11:53 pm
Nocera: Financial Reform Bill is Perfect – If You’re a Bank
Courtesy of Joshua M Brown, The Reformed Broker
Why do I blog so much about financial regulatory reform? Maybe because over a fairly short career of 12 years in the business, about half of those years were spent enduring some of the most destructive calamities in the history of free markets. I’m 33 and have seen enough monetary death and dismemberment to last me 3 lifetimes. Volatility and cycles I can deal with…locusts, pestilence and nuclear detonations are a bit much already.
And I don’t want to hear from any of you Crash of ’87 wusses, we do those types of selloffs like every day.
Anyway, Joe Nocera is back and is dismayed at what he sees as a fairly useless potential bill to be hammered out over the next week or so as the Senate and House versions are melded together…
From the New York Times:
In the first place, there is nothing even remotely radical about anything in these bills. Nobody is suggesting setting up a new Securities and Exchange Commission, which reshaped Wall Street regulation when it was formed in 1934. Nobody is talking about breaking up banks the way they did in the 1930s with the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act. Nobody is even talking about a wholesale revamping of a regulatory system that so clearly failed in this crisis. “They are trying to attack the symptoms, instead of the basic issues,” said Christopher Whalen, managing director of the Institutional Risk Analyst. There is something oh-so-reasonable about these bills, as if Congress was worried that they might do something that would — heaven forbid! — upset the banking industry.
The gist is that the new reforms being proposed are not even sufficient enough to have prevented the last crisis, let alone the next one. Well good, as long as the five largest banks can live with the proposals, I suppose they must be just fine for the rest of us. Rock on.
Source:
A Dubious Way to Prevent Fiscal Crisis (NYT)
Photo by Jr. Deputy Accoutant
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LET THEM EAT CAKE
by ilene - January 1st, 2010 1:51 pm
This is a terrific article on health care reform by Ellen, who also wrote the books Nature’s Pharmacy and The Key to Ultimate Health . Another excellent article on the subject by Charles Hugh Smith is "Why "Healthcare Reform" Is Not Reform, Part I" (here). – Ilene
LET THEM EAT CAKE:
THE ANOMALY OF COMPULSORY PRIVATE HEALTH INSURANCE
Courtesy of Ellen Brown, at The Web of Debt
“Let them eat cake,” the notoriously callous words ascribed to Marie Antoinette, were probably said a century earlier by Marie-Thérèse, the wife of Louis XIV. But whoever said them, the mindset the statement conveys of an aristocracy oblivious to the realities confronting the poor is still with us today.
“Congressmen, what shall we do about the 30 million Americans lacking health insurance?”
“Why, that is simple. Force them to buy it. Fine them heavily if they don’t!”
“What if they don’t have the money?”
“Then take it from those who do!”
The health reform bills now coming through Congress are not focused on how to make health care cheaper or more effective, how to eliminate waste and fraud, or how to cut out expensive middlemen. As originally envisioned, the public option would have pursued those goals. But the public option has been dropped from the Senate bill and radically watered down in the House bill. Rather than focusing on making health care affordable, the bills focus on how to force people either to buy health insurance if they don’t have it, or to pay more for it if they do. If you don’t have insurance and don’t purchase it, you will be subject to a hefty fine. And if you do purchase it, premiums, co-pays, co-insurance payments and deductibles are liable to keep health care cripplingly expensive. Most of the people who don’t have health care can’t afford to pay the deductibles, so they will never use the plans they are forced to buy or be fined.
To subsidize those who can’t pay, the Senate bill would make families earning two to four times the poverty level who don’t have employer-sponsored insurance surrender 8% to 12% of their income to insurance payments, or pay a fine. In another effort to make the insurance payments “affordable,” the Senate bill calls for the lowest cost plan to cover only sixty percent of…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site