....and irrational voters actually BELIEVE this crap!
They were rhetorically deft, sending signals that Washington bank lobbyists surely recognized, but which were almost certainly lost on the overwhelming majority of Americans who don't regularly monitor House Financial Services Committee hearings.
Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie and Rick Santorum all issued calls to repeal, dismantle, hamstring or perform political acts of torture upon Dodd-Frank -- the financial reform law designed to curb the big bank abuses that spawned the worst recession since the Great Depression. Ben Carson may have intended to join them, but was unable to make a coherent point beyond citations of the American revolution, "entrepreneurial risk-taking" and 10-cent increases in the price of soap.
Dodd-Frank has three basic functions. It creates new, tougher rules targeting the biggest banks, including restrictions on risky trading and requirements that the mega-banks at the core of the crisis hold more capital against potential losses. It established a new consumer agency to protect households against predations, including subprime lending. And it created new rules reining in risky trades of derivatives -- the complex contracts traded in the dark that turned subprime loans into a national disaster.
Will someone please tell me what is wrong with those objectives?
"Dodd-Frank is it's a great example of how socialism starts," said Carly Fiorina, who has never held public office but was once ranked by Portfolio magazine as the 19th-worst American CEO of all time.
"The big banks, they have an army of lawyers," Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said. "They can deal with all these things. The small banks ... they can't deal with all these regulations. … This is an outrage. We need to repeal Dodd-Frank."
A compelling case from Rubio -- except the tough rules under Dodd-Frank specifically target big banks. Small banks are explicitly carved out from them. And the definition of a "community bank" is exceptionally generous. Any bank with less than $10 billion in total assets is off the hook, nevermind the details of its loan portfolio or lending terms.
Has Rubio even read the law?
Dodd-Frank has higher capital standards for giant banks than for community banks. The signal was clear. Bush wants to get rid of Dodd-Frank, even if he talks like big banks are a real problem.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) stole the show for pure, unbridled financial irrationality. He called for a return to the Gold Standard -- a policy that even hardline conservative economist Milton Friedman faults as a key driver of the Great Depression -- and heralded the economic stewardship of President Calvin Coolidge, who fed a Wall Street frenzy that eventually resulted in the 1929 stock market crash.
For pure paranoia, however, no one on stage could top Fiorina, who called Dodd-Frank "the classic of crony capitalism."
"We've created something called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a vast bureaucracy with no congressional oversight that's digging through hundreds of millions of your credit records to detect fraud," Fiorina said. "This is how socialism starts, ladies and gentlemen."
Yeah, what a horrible thing: protecting ordinary consumers from fraud, scams, and rip-offs.
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