Obama's New Economic Plan: The Good, the Bad and the Weak

By Nomi Prins, Mother Jones. Posted June 19, 2009.

On Wednesday, after weeks of the requisite press leaks and prefabricated spin, the Obama administration released details of its new "rules of the road" financial regulations, which had been billed as the most sweeping overhaul of the financial system since the Great Depression.

Obama, alas, is no FDR. Roosevelt's New Deal reforms included the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which split complex financial institutions into commercial banks (for consumers) and investment banks (for speculators). This enabled government to safeguard the boring, conventional activities of consumer banking without insuring the dice-rolls of high-risk investors. His reforms also opened the banking sector to independent audits to ensure financial soundness -- as opposed to just taking the banks' word for it, as Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's recent stress tests effectively did -- and established the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, which helped people at risk of foreclosure cover their mortgages.

The administration's new 88-page white paper, titled "Financial Regulatory Reform: A New Foundation," focuses more on alterations than true reform. Some of them are useful, like requiring lenders to keep a stake in the loans they make, and requiring banks to keep adequate capital on hand. The bill would also regulate a portion of the problematic financial instruments known as over-the-counter derivatives. But other aspects are ill advised, like giving the Federal Reserve more oversight, creating an uber-regulator, and allowing Wall Street's biggest players to keep their hands in every pot imaginable.

Let's break it down:

The Good

Obama's plan consolidates certain regulatory functions and imposes restrictions on certain securities. The Office of Thrift Supervision, which monitors thrifts and S&Ls, including AIG -- which was misclassified as an S&L even though it operated an insurance company hedge fund -- gets the axe. The duties of OTS and another regulatory body, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, would go to a new agency called the National Bank Supervisor. Now OTS was an easy target, since few who aren't employed there really care one way or the other. Still, it'll be a while before we know whether the move really does anything to streamline the regulatory system.

A stronger provision of the Obama proposal gives the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation wider authority over banks on the brink of failure. So far, the FDIC has done an excellent job resolving failed banks -- selling their assets, renegotiating loans with consumers -- and bringing them back to health. So giving it additional responsibility makes sense.

Obama's plan would also establish the Consumer Financial Protection Agency to oversee mortgage- and other credit-related consumer products, and to enforce the Community Reinvestment Act, which encourages banks to make loans in disadvantaged areas. If the CFPA is given the enforcement and indictment power of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and actually uses it (unlike the SEC), then so much the better.

Other winners include a proposal to weaken the influence of credit ratings by agencies like Moody's and Standard & Poor's, which helped drive the crisis by downplaying the risk of subprime and other risky securities. Then there's Team Obama's requirement that lenders keep 5 percent of their loan risk on the books rather than selling all of it to Wall Street -- a move that will make lenders think twice before handing half a million bucks to some McDonald's cashier, but one that Wall Street is already fighting.

Another nice idea, though it doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell, calls for bankers in these complex securities deals to be paid based on the long-term performance of the product, as opposed to simply taking their cut as soon as the deal closes. In practice, though, this would be a bureaucratic nightmare -- policing it would require almost as many regulators as there were bankers involved.
  
The Bad

To oversee big insurers, the Obama team wants to create an Office of National Insurance within the Treasury Department. Now, if it weren't for the fact that many insurance companies, notably AIG, had themselves classified as S&Ls, while others are housed within the bank holding company complexes of firms like Citigroup -- thanks to the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 -- this plan might even work. But this isn't the case, and since the plan makes no mention of reconstructing the financial system, this part of it is unlikely to help matters.
 
Establishing a Financial Services Oversight Council chaired by the Treasury Department seems redundant; slapping a new layer of regulatory bureaucracy on an increasingly complex banking system seems more an exercise in appearances than action.

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Nomi Prins is a senior fellow at the public policy center Demos and author of Other People's Money and Jacked: How "Conservatives" are Picking Your Pocket (Whether You Voted for Them or Not).

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