Just what the doctor ordered.

[bigmacbear]

fuzzbearmark posts a link to this article and asks if we are ready for "more stifling Government Controls?" While acknowledging the negative tone of the question, I submit to you all in answer that tighter regulation of financial institutions is precisely what we need.

The root cause of the credit crunch is that certain banks and insurers bet, in the guise of insurance contracts that were not regulated as such, vast sums of other people's money (read: yours and mine) that certain events would not happen. Then, for a number of reasons including overextended homeowners, house-flipping, predatory lending, and the soaring prices of oil and foodstuffs last summer, the bettors lost and the vast sums of money evaporated, impoverishing most of the nation.

Simply put, this kind of situation could not have happened with the kind of financial oversight wisely put into place during the aftermath of the Great Depression, and dismantled primarily under the Reagan administration with the final acts occurring as late as the Clinton administration. Absent these regulations, there has been far too much of the fox guarding the henhouse.

Unfortunately, whatever re-regulation Obama proposes will likely not go far enough, since it retains power in precisely the wrong institutions. The heads of Treasury and the Fed have ties to the very same banks and insurers that caused the crisis in the first place. And many folks blame the Fed for many of the nations' woes, arguing that Congress should never have allowed its prerogatives of making money to be delegated to a private entity beholden to its owners (the major banks of the country) -- and some argue that act was in fact unconstitutional.

But some form of re-regulation will have to be put in place, if only to assuage the anger of the defrauded American people, swindled out of their life's savings by predatory lenders and gamblers in the derivatives markets.