by Deb Cupples | The report is entitled: "Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America." I found a link to a very detailed press release about it at Wall Street Watch. Here are a few snippets:
"The financial sector invested more than $5 billion in political influence purchasing in Washington over the past decade, with as many as 3,000 lobbyists winning deregulation and other policy decisions that led directly to the current financial collapse, according to a 231-page report issued today by Essential Information and the Consumer Education Foundation.
"...[F]rom 1998-2008, Wall Street investment firms, commercial banks, hedge funds, real estate companies and insurance conglomerates made $1.725 billion in political contributions and spent another $3.4 billion on lobbyists, a financial juggernaut aimed at undercutting federal regulation. Nearly 3,000 officially registered federal lobbyists worked for the industry in 2007 alone. The report documents a dozen distinct deregulatory moves that, together, led to the financial meltdown. These include prohibitions on regulating financial derivatives; the repeal of regulatory barriers between commercial banks and investment banks; a voluntary regulation scheme for big investment banks; and federal refusal to act to stop predatory subprime lending.
"'The report details, step-by-step, how Washington systematically sold out to Wall Street,' says Harvey Rosenfield, president of the Consumer Education Foundation, a California-based non-profit organization. 'Depression-era programs that would have prevented the financial meltdown that began last year were dismantled, and the warnings of those who foresaw disaster were drowned in an ocean of political money. Americans were betrayed, and we are paying a high price -- trillions of dollars -- for that betrayal."
If you don't have time to read all 231 pages, you can get details from the 7-page executive summary or the even shorter press release.
Other Buck Naked Politics Posts:
* Door in Face Technique: Bush Convinces Congress to Buy Bailouts
* Executive Pay: Real Bonuses Based on Fake Profits
* AIG Execs Redistributed Shareholder Wealth to Themselves
* Krugman on the "Voodoo" Bank Bailouts
* GAO: Bailed-out Companies have Offshore Tax Havens
* Are Bailout Funds Being Misused?
* Fannie Mae CEO Got $38 Million, Risky Buys Weren't his Fault?
The press release doesn't mention (the report does) two of the most important factors, namely low interest rates and the refusal of the Fed to police predatory lending by banks. But it's interesting, and I gave it and you a link.
Posted by: Charles | March 05, 2009 at 11:53 PM
Thank you, Charles. How are you?
Posted by: Deb | March 07, 2009 at 02:31 PM