Tuesday, March 15, 2011

William Black on the Political Right's Insane Policies of "Governance"

The 40 year long Republican party's push for deregulation based on their ideology that "the government is the problem" set the US up for financial disasters for the last 10 years...

From an article published on Barry Ritholtz's The Big Picture blog:
Collectively, the three “des” – deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization – created a crippling “systems capacity” crisis that achieved its goal of eliminating effective financial regulation in the U.S. for roughly a decade. The result of removing the regulatory system’s capacity to deal effectively with accounting control fraud was an epidemic of such fraud that caused the worst financial and economic crisis in 75 years. There is something outright obscene for the ideologues that gutted regulatory effectiveness to claim that their “success” in causing the regulatory failures justifies exacerbating those failures by budgetary cuts.

Deliberate, crippling limitations on financial regulatory budgets, staffing levels, and pay have played important roles in causing systems capacity problems in prior crises. Consider six recent financial regulatory staffing crises and the House’s ongoing attempts to worsen the SEC and the CFTC’s systems capacity problems.
There is much more, go read the original article. He proceeds to list an indictment with specifics. This is well worth reading.

Here's Black's bottom line:
Not a single senior executive at the large fraudulent lenders making the liar’s loans has been convicted. Our most elite accounting control frauds now loot with impunity. The deliberate creation of severe systems capacity problems is an important contributor to the death of accountability and the rise of crony capitalism in the United States.
Republican political policies catering to a corrupt ultra-rich radical right elite has turned the US into the capital of "crony capitalism". Tragic.

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