Fairly easy to fix, I think.
1) Establish a consumer financial protection agency.
2) Closer regulation of the credit rating agencies.
3) Initiate laws that protect the system from banks that are "too big to fail.". Personally, I think breaking up the companies into smaller components would be an idea worth considering.
4) Put some teeth back in Shareholders Rights so stockholders can actually have some say in who runs their company and how much they get paid. The government should not be involved in this decision.
5) Devise some way to make it more painful to foreclose on responsible qualified homeowners than to re-negotiate an equitable loan
6) Resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act.
7) And to keep all the Rats from gnawing through the baseboards, and around new legislation, implement real campaign finance reform so politicians do not need to raise massive amounts of money just to stay in their jobs. Then lobbyists will have nothing to offer a politician except a point of view.
From Today's News on the Same Subject.
Robert Reich, Pat Buchanan Agree: We Should Have Let Some Big Banks Fail (VIDEO)
Reich: “You know it's interesting Pat Buchanan, I start worrying about my own convictions when I hear you repeating back to me exactly what I believe. We ought to have either had kind of a restructuring of all of these big banks based upon something like Chapter 11, or we should have had a kind of temporary receivership, but we have the worst of both worlds. Taxpayers bailed them out so right now they know they were going to get a bailout next time. Before they didn't even know they were going to get a bailout, now they're making these wild trades they're doing the same risky stuff they were doing before, and now they know that if they get in trouble the government is going to bail them out because they are, quote, "too big to fail." Nothing in capitalism, no entity should be too big to fail.”
Stiglitz Says Banking Problems Are Now Bigger Than Pre-Lehman
“In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”
Stiglitz’s views echo those of former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who has advised President Barack Obama’sStanley Fischer, who suggested last month that governments may want to discourage financial institutions from growing “excessively.”
Elizabeth Warren: "Until We Have A Credible Liquidation Threat, We Don't Have Capitalism In America" (VIDEO)
TARP watchog Elizabeth Warren has been critical of how the bank bailouts have been handled, but in an interview with MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan Monday morning she praised Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner for some of his recent testimony before Congress:
The question of regulatory reform is really on the table now. He was saying, in effect, if we don't change the rules going forward... we're not going to be able to get ourselves out of this crisis without some risk of falling right back into it. That was a very strong and very different message from the one he delivered last time we were talking.
She concluded with three things she would like to see implemented:
1) a consumer financial protection agency.
2) regulation of the credit rating agencies.
3) new laws that protect the system from banks that are "too big to fail."
Warren told Ratigan: "Until we have a credible liquidation threat, we don't have capitalism in America. It just doesn't work without that."
Arianna Huffington: Why Obama Won't Be Able to Reform Wall Street
There was a moment in the president's speech today that spoke volumes about the high hurdle financial reform is facing. The White House had sent a copy of the president's remarks to reporters and I was underlining key parts of it as he spoke. In the speech as written, he was supposed to call on Wall Street "to embrace serious financial reform, not fight it." But when the president actually delivered the line, he edited it, saying instead that Wall Street should "embrace serious reform, not resist it." That one-word change says everything you need to know about why all the president's well-intentioned pronouncements won't actually lead to fundamental reform. Because he's utterly misreading the opponents of reform. They are not passively resisting; they are aggressively fighting against reform with every weapon they have in their extremely well-funded arsenal.
The Continuing Disaster of Wall Street, One Year Later, Robert Reich
Let's be clear: The Street today is up to the same tricks it was playing before its near-death experience. Derivatives, derivatives of derivatives, fancy-dance trading schemes, high-risk bets. "Our model really never changed, we've said very consistently that our business model remained the same," says Goldman Sach's chief financial officer.
The only difference now is that the Street's biggest banks know for sure they'll be bailed out by the federal government if their bets turn sour -- which means even bigger bets and bigger bucks."
Judge Overturns Bank Of America-SEC Settlement Over Merrill Bonuses
"U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff held up his approval of the settlement, however, and ordered the SEC last month to explain why it didn't pursue charges against specific executives at Bank of America over the accusations.
Rakoff, was concerned that Bank of America was paying the penalty with Shareholders money, when it was the shareholders who had suffered form the actions of Bank of America. In another recent case Rakoff ruled that the penalty, instead of going to the SEC, should go directly to the shareholders.
Rakoff, in his ruling, found that the settlement "suggests a rather cynical relationship between the parties: the SEC gets to claim that it is exposing wrongdoing on the part of the Bank of America in a high-profile merger, the bank's management gets to claim that they have been coerced into an onerous settlement by overzealous regulators. And all this is done at the expense, not only of the shareholders, but also of the truth."
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