The first good news to emerge since the start of the Financial Crisis came out yesterday as the remarkably dumb regulations requiring Mark-to-Market accounting were repealed. Maybe the government can do some good, after all.
Mark-to-Market (MtM) accounting, along with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) were the two prime regulatory failures leading to the current crisis. Coupled with public mandated policy to extend mortgages into sub-prime markets through the facilitation of Fanni Mae and Freddie Mac, Mark-to-Market caused, and then accelerated, the financial crisis and lead to the failure of major banking institutions around the globe.
“But I thought it was the greedy bankers that did this?”
Yes, that is what you are being told. Targeting a small group for blame is easier than telling you the truth, that those bankers were working in a system created by gasp Washington.
It is nearly impossible for the current administration to say this becuse they have a vested interest in villifying a secret enemy of those that ‘did’ rather ‘that’ which did, because the ‘that’ is them. Now however, having exausted all other options their only recourse has been to do what works and change some really bad regulations. It took the French and Germans to beat it out of poor Mr. Obama though.
SOX and MtM came out of ...
Barack Orwell Obama
“Just don’t call it a surge”.
From a policy perspective I guess I should be happy. The Obama administration is pursuing policies that look identical to those from the last administration, even if they are named differently. It’s become so blatant that even the New York (Obama is the messiah!) Times has begun to report it, and Jon Stewart is laughing at it.
Tens of thousand of troops are pouring into terrorist enclaves. (We used to call that “the surge”)
Know enemies of the state will be detained indefinitely (Close Guantanamo, but move the prisoners to an other secret facility, and keep some there, perhaps, forever)
Pay cap restrictions are being circumvented (The administration is building loop holes into the Pay for Performance act and providing instruction to their employees at the banks on how to use them)
We no longer are fighting a war on terror, now we have “overseas contingency operations” to prevent “man-caused catastrophes” (Listening to Hillary say these ridiculous phrases makes me think of the sweetness of political revenge. No woman from the Midwest can say those words without sounding churlish.)
But somehow I am dishearten by the disingenuousness of it all...