Thursday, January 15, 2015

Tea Party Hates Wall Street? Why are they silent on Republicans dismantling Dodd-Frank and dirivitives?

http://theweek.com/articles/533596/tea-party-hates-wall-street-isnt-protesting-gop-efforts-todismantle-doddfrank

For a movement supposedly founded on opposition to the Wall Street bailout, the Tea Party’s people in Congress seem awfully keen to take the reins off the financial sector.
On Wednesday, House Republicans amended the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform bill to delay for two years a requirement that big banks sell off risky debt bundles that entangle them with hedge funds and private equity firms. At the end of last year, they rolled back a provision that would’ve forced banks to trade credit default swaps using subsidiaries that aren’t federally insured. The GOP is also taking a run at lessening federal oversight over certain private equity activities and derivatives trading. House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) — a Tea Party ally — has spearheaded many of the efforts.
While most of Dodd-Frank remains intact, the moves represents a death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy to allow Wall Street to engage in riskier behavior. And as the country has learned the hard way, risky behavior by Wall Street tends to create financial crises, and lawmakers pretty much always respond to those crises with bailouts. And while the Tea Party is a complex beast, fury over the 2008 TARP bill, which handed hundreds of billions of dollars to Wall Street, was clearly one of its founding impulses.
So what gives? Why nary a peep from the Tea Party as the GOP effectively sets about trying to make a sequel to TARP more likely?




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