Clamp Down on Giant Banks?

We don't need "tough new regulations". We need less Federal meddling and consistent oversight using current law.

Considering that the most recent bank failures can be directly attributable to the Fed's Affordable Home Loan initiative (and their insistence, through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that banks provide a percentage of risky loans), and the Fed's encouragement of risky derivatives based on those loans, it appears to me that the finger points directly at the Feds.

Let's not kid ourselves. The banking system can get into lots of trouble by itself but this time the Feds didn't only NOT follow through with regulatory mandates, they ADDED to and encouraged the risky behavior.

Follow the money.

Hooker

Government is there to intervene when things go wrong. It needs to realize that a handful of people in the business world going criminal doesn't mean that the whole business world is criminal and now needs heavy regulation. The government should have a monitoring function and only step in when things go wrong and the company involved does not seem to be correcting the situation on its own. And of course the first action would be to tell the company involved to correct the problem. The oversight function is a legitimate one in a society. It does not have to mean that everybody ends up suffering from onerous regulations and paperwork. We need a system based on the idea of "transparency," or a certain amount of critical information being freely available, so that the general scene can be monitored without excessive intervention. Governments, I might add, seem at an amazingly primitive state in this regard considering that protecting honest people against criminal elements has always been one of their primary purposes.