Citibank

As written about extensively here, government regulators have failed us in so many ways that to continue the practice of putting more control in the hands of government is lunacy.  To wit:

• The financial crisis, although typically blamed on Wall Street greed, was due in large part to government agencies and programs (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, HUD, Community Reinvestment Act, National Homeownership Strategy) that opened the door through which Wall Street followed.
• The oil spill in the Gulf happened after regulators either signed off on waiver applications from BP or just didn’t enforce the regulations on the books
• Anywhere from $60 billion to $100 billion is stolen from Medicare/Medicaid every year and our government can’t seem to stop it
• First time homebuyer tax credit was claimed, to the tune of $9 million, by incarcerated felons.

But the current administration insists that government must get bigger to tackle our nation’s problems and must tax us more to do so.

Senator Chris Dodd and Representative Barney Frank were at the heart of the financial debacle, claiming that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in sound financial shape.  Meanwhile Senator Dodd was getting a sweetheart mortgage from Countrywide as a “Friend of Angelo” Mozillo, the CEO of Countrywide.  Now we are to believe that Senator Dodd and Representative Frank have ridden to the rescue and have crafted the solution we have all been waiting for, just don’t ask about Fannie and Freddie, they aren’t included in this master work.

The Federal Reserve will now have more power to regulate banks, after failing to monitor what was going on at Citibank and having the government step in because they were “too big to fail.”  The Treasury stepped into to bail out some banks and let other financial firms like Lehman Brothers to go under, will now have more power to determine which financial institutions are sound and which ones are not and step in to take control without allowing the bankruptcy courts to get involved.  The SEC which was asleep at the switch, or too busy watching porn on taxpayer purchased computers,  when the Bernie Madoff scam was delivered to them wrapped in a bow, will now have more power to decide how easy it will be to allow union pension funds to place their candidates on boards of directors.

The new legislation, which does nothing really new, runs to 2,000 pages (did you expect something less?) and leaves much of the details to the regulatory agencies themselves to fill in the blanks.  And never to miss an opportunity to slip a new tax into the mix there are $19 billion in new taxes to pay for this new regulatory oversight.

So when regulators fail, the government’s response is not to look at government’s role in creating the original problem, but to blame any private interests and add more regulations that will increase the scope and power of the government, take away your liberties, and do nothing to fix the original problem.  When the next crash comes, and it will, these same folks will say, “oh, dear, how did this happen?”  They will blame any private interests that are anywhere near the problem, absolve government agencies of all blame, and layer on more regulations.

The only way to fix this problem is to make sure these same folks are not around in the future and to cut the government down to size.