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...week later, Obama proposed new restrictions on big banks, aimed at limiting their size while prohibiting them from playing the markets with their own cash. "If these folks want a fight," he thundered, "it's a fight I'm ready to have." In case anyone missed the point, Obama used the word fight or fighting 22 times in a speech the next day in Ohio. (See judgments of Obama's first year, issue by issue...
...Senate Banking Committee, where the GOP and several Democrats have expressed doubts about a new bureaucracy. After health care, that's a price the Administration is now willing to pay. It's no coincidence that the day before Obama announced his latest push to crack down on big banks, his confidants David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett met with Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) watchdog Elizabeth Warren, the intellectual mother of the consumer agency and the most prominent populist advocate for financial reform. "They made it very clear that Wall Street needs to stop acting like nothing has changed," Warren told...
...coincidence that the President made his announcement while standing next to the unlikeliest populist advocate for financial reform, 82-year-old former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, a previously marginalized Obama adviser who had chastised the Administration for making insufficient efforts to limit the size and risk profiles of big banks. The White House is tired of complaints that its economic team - especially Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the former New York Fed president who helped bail out AIG and other failing firms - is too close to Wall Street. Bringing the legendary gray eminence in from the cold - Obama called...
...Allergic to Populism Shortly after Obama unveiled a $117 billion plan to tax the riskier liabilities of larger financial firms, Geithner hosted a dinner for bankers. A few of them grumbled about Big Government, class warfare and the unfairness of scapegoating financial institutions that already repaid their bailout money while GM and Chrysler keep hemorrhaging taxpayer cash. But one midsize-bank CEO suggested the tax was a reasonable surcharge on too-big-to-fail conglomerates that benefit from an implicit guarantee of federal help in a crisis. "If I fail, the FDIC shuts me down," he said. Then he gestured...
...Obama's bank tax - designed not only to make taxpayers whole but also to discourage excessive risk-taking - came from Geithner. And so did most of the Administration's plans to address the too-big-to-fail problem, create an independent consumer agency for financial products and otherwise overhaul the regulatory system that failed so dramatically in 2008. Geithner sees big banks not as evil empires to be toppled but as moneymaking machines to be restrained, so that the panic and bailouts of two years ago are never repeated. Just because it's populist, he likes to say, doesn...