I am talking about the financial reform bill that has been referred to many times as completely and utterly worthless. Barack Obama trumpeted the reform bill excitedly and called it as “the biggest rewrite of Wall Street rules since the biggest depression.” However, the Wall Street got their hands to it and carved their own agenda into it, leaving the bill completely watered down and toothless.

In its last months published article, “Expert Roundtable: Will the Financial Reform Bill Prevent Future Crisis?” The Motley Fool records a comment by Charles Geisst, professor of finance at Manhattan College who called the market crash four years prior in his book Undue Influence: How the Wall Street Elite Puts the Financial System at Risk. He said,

Like health-care reform, this bill is being drawn up to grab headlines but its details betray it as nothing more than a slap on the wrist for Wall Street. It is true that Wall Street can commit grand theft and apparently get off with nothing more than community service.

According to the Economic Collapse Blog, “The Democrats in the Senate were ecstatic when they announced that they had secured the 60 votes needed to pass this legislation, but when they are asked about what the financial reform bill will do, most of them are left stammering for some kind of cohesive response.  The sad truth is that most of them probably don’t understand the bill and none of them will probably ever read the entire thing.”

What the financial reform bill is really doing is create more and more bureaucracy, more paperwork and even more power to the Federal Reserve. Go through the quotes of the bill below, as posted on the Economic Collapse Blog:

Federal regulators will receive more authority to monitor everything from mortgages to complex derivatives.

Does this mean more federal regulations?

Financial firms will be required to reduce the debt they take on and to hold more capital in reserve.

This will probably make these firms more stable but how much different will this really make?

The U.S. government will be given extensive power to seize collapsing financial firms.  Federal regulators would keep collapsing firms operating long enough to prevent a massive panic and would slowly sell off its pieces.

More socialism?

The financial reform bill creates a new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection at the Federal Reserve that is supposed to help prevent abusive lending by mortgage and credit card companies.

Wow more power for the Federal Reserve?

There are still a lot of things that the financial reform bill is not doing which actually really needs to be done. The fact that the ‘too-big-to-fails’ are still around and even greedily grab more and more of the market share is not handled by the bill. We are about to witness the biggest banking consolidation in history and this bill does nothing about it. This is only one example.

Read the more detailed article about the worthless 2,300 pages of financial reform bill here.

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