Question: Were Congress to hand the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve “broad new government authority to regulate or even take control of financial institutions other than banks,” who would be the beneficiary?
The answer might lie in this description of the plan on The New York Times web site:
The government has such authority for banks; the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has power to step in to clean up a bank’s books and alter business practices like executive compensation. There is no such federal authority for non-bank entities, like A.I.G., that in recent years have become bigger players in the financial system. Sheila C. Bair, the chairwoman of the F.D.I.C., has said she believed such authority was necessary.
The administration — because of its ties to Wall Street via its financial team — has been too cautious in dealing with the financial sector, playing to accepted cliches that no longer apply (not that they ever did). Those ties raise questions, as David Sirota points out, about whether the administration would have used the authority it is now seeking.
However, if the populist pressure out there is making them demand this authority, then that’s a good thing. Once they have this authority, they will have a harder time pretending they can’t do anything to stop the kleptocracy.
Hank Kalet 
The kleptos are in the gooferement! The Wall Street thieves are petty by comparison. Keep your eyes on the congress critters and track how much \”bailout money\” comes back to them as graft or \”campaign contributions\”. Don\’t get distracted by the \”theater\”!
Bravo to Bernie Sanders who is a voice of independence, integrity and honesty in the senate and who is not beholden to any special interests or corporate lobbyists. Sanders scolded and roasted Greenspan\’s tush back in the day when everyone else was fawning at Greenspan\’s libertarian ideology and weltanschaung.Bravo again for Sander\’s opposition to the appointment of Gary Gensler to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).Gensler was part of the group that deregulated Credit Default swaps which led to the collapse of A.I.G. and has resulted in the largest taxpayer bailout in U.S. history. He also participated in the deregulation of electronic energy trading which led to the downfall of ENRON and to the spike in energy prices.Gensler supported Gramm-Leach-Bliley, which allowed banks like Citigroup to become “too big to fail.”I wish Obama would dump or sideline Geithner and Summers.Bernie Sanders is an independent and a democratic (small d) socialist in the style of Sweden, Denmark or Norway, not the USSR.
>Greenspan's libertarian ideologyGreenspan may have been a \”gold bug\” in his younger days, but, once he was offered the Fed chair, he renounced his conscience, took the big money, and went to the dark side of fiat currency. More than Frank or Dodd, or anyone else, he's responsible for the \”printing press\” money that has gotten us into the mess we are in.Without a gold standard, there is no way to avoid the boom and bust bubbles we see. Bernie is a socialist. Alan is just turncoat. Alan's worse because he knew better.Please don't call him a libertarian. You can tell a libertarian by any one of a number of \”litmus test\” issues — commodity money, guns, drug war, taxes, or \”rights\”.