[quote=markmax33]So in other words you are admitting Ron Paul was correct that the GOV GSEs were the ENABLERS and had a historic role in starting this whole mess. All Ron Paul predicted was that the GOV GSEs would have a role in a future housing bubble before ANYBODY else said it. To me it is clearly obvious that when he has predicted 90% of the things wrong in the country and there are videos, books, etc to prove it, he is the only man in Congress who can actually get a vote.
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Uh…no. I’m not sure how you reached that conclusion. Maybe show your work. The nexus between the GSE’s initiating the sale of MBS’s in 1968 and the bubble crash in 2003-2011?
I’m reasonably sure that Ron Paul was not the first to say it. The conspiracy theorists, the Fed, the Trilateral Commission, the CFR, the Bilderberg Group. The evil bankers. Many have made the same claims he has over the years. And others have made the same claims I have, that Gramm Leach Bliley, the bill that repeales Glass Steagall would lead to disaster.
Senator Byron Dorgan had this to say on the Senate floor, before the bill was passed. You’ll like the first part.
Of course the Fed has an inherent conflict of interest. I think, if the Congress were thinking very clearly about the Federal Reserve Board, they would decide immediately that the Federal Reserve Board is not the locus of supervision of banks. The Federal Reserve Board is in charge of monetary policy. It is fundamentally a conflict of interest to be listening to the Fed about what is good for banks when they are involved in running the monetary policy of this country. If the Federal Reserve Board were, in my judgment, doing what it ought to be doing, it would be leading the charge, saying we need to regulate risky hedge funds because banks are involved in substantial risk on these hedge funds. Apparently hedge funds have become too big to fail. Then there needs to be some regulation.
snip
I wrote an article in 1994 for the Washington Monthly magazine and derivatives at that point were $35 trillion. You know something, today in this country banks are trading derivatives on their own proprietary accounts. They could just as well put a roulette wheel in the lobby. They could just as well call it a casino. Banks ought not be trading derivatives on their proprietary accounts. I have an amendment to prohibit that. I don’t suppose it would get more than a handful of votes, but I intend to offer it.
snip
We have folks outside who have worked on this very hard and who very much want this to happen. We have a lot of folks in here who are very compliant to say: Absolutely, let me be the lead singer. And here we are. We have this bill, which I will bet, in 5, 10, 15 years from now, we will be back thinking of this bill like we thought of the bill passed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which this Congress unhitched the savings and loans so some sleepy little Texas institution could gather brokered deposits from all around America and, like a giant rocket, become a huge enterprise. And guess what. With all the speculation in the S&Ls and brokered deposits and all the things that went with it that this Congress allowed, what did it cost the American taxpayer to bail out that bunch of failures? What did it cost? Hundreds of billions of dollars. I will bet one day somebody is going to look back at this and they are going to say: How on Earth could we have thought it made sense to allow the banking industry to concentrate, through merger and acquisition, to become bigger and bigger and bigger; far more firms in the category of too big to fail? How did we think that was going to help this country? Then to decide we shall fuse it with inherently risky enterprises, how did we think that was going to avoid the lessons of the past?
He said those words in 1999.
And Ron Paul? He voted no. He didn’t like it for similar reasons as Dorgan, though he was a little more focused (obsessed?) with the Fed role in supporting the de-regulation. Kind of interesting. A libertarian voting to KEEP regulations, not to deregulate. Good for him.
