More Idle Ramblings

Last evening I spent some time at the White House web site. I watched the President's speech on reforming regulation in the financial industry. I also printed some pdfs from the site. One of these, titled "Requiring Strong Supervision And Regulation Of All Financial Firms", talks about creating a Financial Services Oversight Council. It would have eight members, with the Secretary of the Treasury serving as chair. Among the other members would be: the Chair of the FDIC, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and the chair of the SEC. In other words, pretty much the same bunch who were asleep at the switch when this whole mess was being created by their greedy cronies. This council would, according to the document, "Have broad authority to gather information through the Chair from any financial firm to identify emerging risks to financial stability.", "Identify gaps in regulation and prepare an annual report to Congress...", "Recomend firms for indentificationas Tier 1 Financial Holding Companies...", "Provide consultation on material prudential standards...", "Provide a forum for discussion of cross-cutting issues...", and "Facilitate information sharing...". Does anyones else see a pattern here? What with all the gathering, identifying, recomending, and providing of forums they will probably be too tuckered out to make any real difference in the way regulations are enforced.

Another little gem from the same document:" The Federal Reserve currently holds regulatory responsibilities over bank holding companies and is best suited to take on authority and accountabilty for consolidated supervision of all Tier 1 FHCs." Great Idea! These guys did such a great job of overseeing the banks these past several years, they should oversee all the big (ie too big to be allowed to fail) financial firms. I am already sleeping better.

To be fair, there are some things in the document that make sense to me such as higher capital and liquidity requirements for "Tier 1 FHCs" and this: "Under the President's pla the SEC will have authoriy to require companies to allow shareholders to vote on executive-compasation packages to help ensure that compensation packagesare closely aligned with the interests of shareholders.' Sounds OK unless the guys getting those obscene amounts of unearned money can out vote the rest of the shareholders.

I'll have more to say about his later, but this one finger typing is so slow and I do want to move on to the truely trivial.

Why do all those right wing nut jobs on talk radio always whine about the liberal bias of the mainstream media? From my experience, trying to find liberal or even center-left opinion in mainstream media is like looking for gold in a dumpster. If you find some, you can bet it got there by accident. Those who gripe about liberal bias in media the obviously not reading, listening, or watching anything remotely "mainstream". More on this later as well.

Today's music recomendations:
Dvorak - Symphony #9
Lee Morgan - The Sidewinder
Sia - Some People Have Real Problems

Today's Fiction:
Let it Bleed by Ian Rankin

Todays Nonfiction:
The Year of Decision 1846 by Bernard deVoto
This excellent book has several threads, but two of them that I find most interesting are the selling of the Mexican-American War (President Polk could have been the prototype for George W the talking shrub) and the Donner party's trek to their fate in the high Sierras.