Regulators Move to Ease Post-Crisis Oversight of Wall Street | Hacker News Reader

Regulators Move to Ease Post-Crisis Oversight of Wall Street

nytimes.com

51 pointsareoform31 comments

I feel like they learned their lesson, and unfortunately for us that lesson was the government will bail out big banks and executives will get away with it unscathed so let’s start the boom bust cycle over again in earnest.

Well, if you're taking about TARP, the big banks paid everything back with interest, so the government has even made some profit from this bailout.

The main point being made, I think, is that the government's job isn't to choose the winners and losers in the market.

There's no way the government can avoid doing that. The job of any regulator is to choose winners and losers, to keep things balanced.

The problem is that in this case, the government chose to bail out the giant entities that caused the problem, and totally ignore the individual citizens who were really harmed by it.

But doesn't the government have a responsibility to help ensure jobs are available to it's citizens? That there is a food supply that is stable and won't collapse with disruptions? That you have the industry to make tanks and planes in the event of a war? Turning everything over to the free market is not a stable solution.

but in this case government makes sure that there are no losers at least in banking system.

Certainly, why would anyone want to be anything else in life other than a banker? No matter what happens, or what mistakes you make you'll get bailed out. Safest and most lucrative job in the world.

What about the home owners? No one bailed them out. Its always privatize the profits and socialize the losses.

This is by design:

https://nowthisnews.com/videos/politics/jennifer-lawrence-is...

https://represent.us/

Federal elected officials spend 70% of their time now fundraising, so they only listen to their donors. And their donors are billionaires and large institutions.

So there is no statistical correlation now between an issue's popularity and whether it gets passed into law (voters have been disenfranchised).

Meaning the next bailout will happen exactly the same as the last one, unless left-right coalitions and other organizations work to end corruption at the local grassroots level and work their way up to state and federal.

There were (and still are) homeowners assist programs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_Home_Affordable

Or by "bailout" you mean something different?

Would the homeowners have paid back the bailout money with interest?

The interest rate on TARP loans was well below market, so even though the banks did pay some interest it was still a sweetheart deal.

Anyways, TARP was dwarfed by Quantitative Easing. The FED printed around $1.8 trillion to buy distressed assets from banks. To this day the FED still holds some $1.7 trillion in mortgage backed securities on its books.

Uhhh, did you forget the only reason they did that was so Washington wouldn't restrict their executive handouts? They wanted to pay their brass and the government started giving them a hard time.

If they could have cashed those checks, paid executive bonuses, AND not paid back their loan; they wouldn't have.

This is a classic example of using the truth to tell a lie.

The banks did repay their loans, this is true.

They also got to take HUGE risks without having to bear the risk, yet they got to capture the entire reward.

The government didn't charge the big banks a multi-trillion dollar tax for taking on the risk of doing TARP.

But this is also not entirely true. Banks did not know they were taking a huge risk. They did not understand how leveraged they actually were because securitized mortgages were being misrepresented by credit rating agencies[0].

The entire purpose of TARP was to prevent a depression. It was meant to be a stopgap.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_rating_agencies_and_the...

> government will bail out big banks

I really think the fabric of the USA economic system was changed with the decisions made during the 2008 financial crisis. Many citizens felt the game was rigged; large corporations held undue influence in the federal government. 2008 proved the USA has transitioned to corporate capitalism.

It is still stupefying how a country based on capitalism wouldn't allow the tenets of capitalism to play out.

I think two books on this subject are extremely informative. One is _Stress Test_ by Timothy Geithner, the other is _The end of Alchemy_ by Mervyn King.

Both have to do with the policies discussed in this article and the Lender of Last Resort (LOLR) policies implicit in the role of central banks.

You are describing the Moral Hazard risks that Geithner mostly dismisses as irrelevant in the moment, and which King believes needs to be removed from the system entirely. The combination of the two works gives a lot to think about.

Alternate title: Regulators Move to Ease Pre-Crisis Oversight of Wall Street.

Took me a minute to get that.

And, arguably, that's what happened last time - the repeal of Glass-Steagall was a big part of creating the environment where the crisis was possible.

"Stock trading is a young man's game. Right about ten or twelve years after a crisis, most of the brokers are the floor are too young to remember what the last crash looked like. You start to hear rumors about bold new ways of doing things, bold new ways which usually amount to lying, cheating, and stealing."

Wouldn’t large banks and other institutions be in favor of more regulations to deepen their moats?

I could see why they’d want to get rid of Volckler though, so the big I-banks can return to the serious pre-crisis trading revenues they were printing.

Just looking quickly at Goldman’s 2006 10K shows they had over $25B in trading revenue, compared to $5.6B from their traditional investment banking sleeve. I had no idea it was at that level, wow.

Banking is already very difficult to enter. They have one of the biggest moats across all industries. This is just a block on extra risky behaviors that are quite lucrative for the banks.

Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

I don't know if this saying applies here.

In the crisis, the finance industry was able to pillage the wealth of the citizenry, then foreclose on all the property when it blew up, then rent the property back to the citizens.

A saying for this situation would be more like "A pack of wolves won't be satisfied with eating just one sheep"

If the citizenry isn't able to defend itself by electing good representation, it's defenseless to this type of predation.

Great.

So nobody learned anything, back to business as usual.

Boom. Bust. Bailout. Boom. Bust. Bailout.

And the tax payer will get the shaft, every time.

Glass-Steagall needs to be repealed.

Why? Do you have a better solution that doesn’t involve bankrupting individuals and paying out corporations who gambled on other peoples money?

Are you cosplaying as the Monopoly man? Nobody who lived beyond the 1920's thinks this is a valid idea.

I think those replying (and downvoting) need to adjust their sarcasm detector and re-read.

Except there are plenty of people who truly believe that, and it's hard to tell the difference anymore

There's plenty of people who believe that Glass-Steagall needs to be repealed? It was repealed in 1999 (the relevant parts, anyway). That's part of how we got to 2008.

Anyone who believes that Glass-Steagall needs to be repealed is literally two decades behind on the news.

That's why I think that it was sarcasm. "We need to remove the post-crisis oversight" is being compared to repeal of Glass-Steagall. That helped create the next (2008) crisis; the implication being that ending the post-crisis supervision will help create the next crisis.

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