Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Finance, the economy & Economics How will the financial crisis develop?

In an amazing feat of bipartisanship AND REPUBLICAN COMMON SENSE
John McCain has joined forces with Maria Cantwell to
resurrect GLASS-STEAGALL~!

Be still my heart!

I thought McCain had lost all his marbles when he picked Sarah Palin. But now I see it might have been temporary.

New respect for John McCain from a person who chucked his decision and decided to vote for Obama last year.
John, I wish you had shown this sort of smarts last year.

It is, of course, only a first step. But in Europe we can hardly measure how revolutionary a step is for the United States. On Friday, December 11, not only did the House of Representatives pass the most important financial reform bill since the 1930s - 1,279 pages, no less - but it included the creation of a protection agency for consumers. An agency in charge of regulating and observing financial products aimed at private consumers, from mortgages to credit cards, in order to better counter “predatory practices.”

From Brussels to Paris, this step could seem obvious. But on the banks of the Potomac in Washington, it constitutes a huge innovation, fought against as such by the Wall Street lobby and its partisans in Congress.

[SNIP]

Creating a federal agency in charge of the financial protection of consumers would...mean aligning with Canadian and European standards. “Socialist” standards, in other words, for the most extreme apostles of entrepreneurial freedom. This is the reason Barack Obama was forced to reach out to common sense on Saturday to justify his reform. It is the reason why the battle the president is about to embark upon with the Senate will be one of the hardest of his mandate.

I am a little confused by the above posting

On one hand, it is saying that there is some revolutionary activity happening... on the other hand, we all know that nothing is happening and Obama has sold out to wall street.

On the face of it, these seem mutually exclusive. So I presume that one or the other is mistaken.

[b]The US workforce shrank by 652,000 in June, one of the sharpest contractions ever. The rate of hourly earnings fell 0.1pc. Wages are flirting with deflation.

"The economy is still in the gravitational pull of the Great Recession," said Robert Reich, former US labour secretary.

"All the booster rockets for getting us beyond it are failing....
The share of the US working-age population with jobs in June actually fell from 58.7pc to 58.5pc. This is the real stress indicator. The ratio was 63pc three years ago. Eight million jobs have been lost.
The average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks. Nothing like this has been seen before in the post-war era. Jeff Weniger, of Harris Private Bank, said this compares with a peak of 21.2 weeks in the Volcker recession of the early 1980s....
The Fed is already eyeing the printing press again. "It's appropriate to think about what we would do under a deflationary scenario," said Dennis Lockhart for the Atlanta Fed.