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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