Word: congressed
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Then again, decisions made by Congress, the Bush and Clinton administrations and federal regulators in the years before the crisis also played a key role in allowing things to get so bad. From ill-considered deregulation of banking and derivatives to over-the-top encouragement of home ownership, Washington's fingerprints were all over the crisis. Almost nothing has been done so far to right these wrongs, or otherwise rein in the excesses of the financial system. Which brings us to lesson No. 3: It's really hard for a democracy to make big changes in the absence of crisis...
President Barack Obama did warn in his speech to Wall Street on Monday that "normalcy cannot breed complacency." But normalcy is breeding complacency - perhaps because complacency is normal. Consider the financial reforms that the Obama Administration wants to push through Congress before year-end - creating a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, giving the Federal Reserve the job of systemic risk regulator, and establishing a "resolution regime" to wind down troubled nonbank financial institutions (like Lehman) and complex bank holding companies in an orderly fashion. Steps in the right direction? Probably. Truly major reforms? Not so much...
...months after Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, Congress legislated a complete transformation of Wall Street and the banking sector with the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., and the segregation of commercial banks from Wall Street. It's not obvious that we need such a drastic overhaul now, but still, the contrasts with 1930s are stark. Ironic, too. By following their belief that financial markets should work out their own problems, Andrew Mellon and his kindred spirits at the Fed triggered a financial collapse that more or less ensured major, permanent...
...ratify the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). How does your appointment further U.S. involvement with the ICC and international law? The decision about the ICC treaty has to be made by the President of the U.S. In 2002, Congress passed the American Service Member's Protection Act that prohibited U.S. cooperation in the ICC in many areas. [There was a fear that U.S. soldiers could be targeted in politically motivated prosecutions.] But it also included a provision that U.S. authorities could cooperate to bring to trial individuals like [former Yugoslav President] Slobodan Milosevic. I think...
...Which countries do you hope to focus on? There are situations that have already been handed to us. There is a report from the Department of State on the war in Sri Lanka due in Congress [on Sept. 21]. Additionally, the office, together with the Secretary for Global Affairs and the Secretary of State, has the responsibility to collect information on ongoing atrocities, and it is then the responsibility of the President to determine what steps might be taken towards justice. Like the canary in the coal mine, we give the signal that something very serious is occurring...