The regulations will ensure that banks have sufficient assets to weather bad loans, less incentive to make these toxic loans and bundle them into even worse investments for others. The regulations will also prevent Goldman Sachs and others from lying to their customers about the viability of their investments while betting against the investments they advised them to make and thereby making a fortune off their customers' losses.
Republicans in the House passed legislation that would enable any regulations to be easily repealed, and to replace a director of the bureau with a 5-member commission to ensure that each regulation is diluted by committee action. They say that they passed this stuff to ensure that they have a watchdog watching the watchdog, but it is clear what they want to do is let the banks continue their predatory practices that brought the global financial market to its knees.
They are being aided by almost $19 million in contributions from the banks and the US Chamber of Commerce (which has the distinction of having very few actual corporate members because of its incredibly far right wing politics).
Given the Tea Partiers hatred for financial chicanery, why aren't they demanding that the Repubs support the CFPB and provide average Americans with protection from the greed of these institutions? Some blame the poor, because clearly the poor have such great leverage that they were able to force banks to make these upside down loans. Who knew that banks would quail before the mighty poor and make loans they knew were bound to fail. It's not like they have the power to deny a loan to someone not qualified.
You'd think that for the 6 years when Repubs had control of the House, the Senate and the Presidency, that they would have put in place regulations to allow banks to fight back against the domination of our financial sector by the poor. I guess they were too distracted by eliminating our Constitutional rights to fight terrorism. Or perhaps they were distracted by the huge campaign contributions the financial institutions made to allow them to not only make these toxic loans, but also to package them for sale to others who then sold them to others, etc. until the bubble burst and we taxpayers had to bail out their sorry asses.
Wasn't that why the Tea Parties were formed to fight against the things that caused this huge bailout? Maybe they are being distracted by gay marriage, since one Tea Party linked this issue to our economic woes. So, now it's the gays who are the problem - and probably public school teachers. But never the banks. So that's why they don't need to be regulated. I can only guess because the silence from the Tea Parties on this issue is deafening.
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