Legislators Poised to 'Regulate' Life Out of the Economy

Washington banking and finance bigwigs Barney Frank (of Fannie Mae-boyfriend fame and who once owned an apartment used for a gay prostitution ring) and Chris Dodd (implicated in Countrywide scandal, son of one of the only censured Senators in U.S. history) are poised to stand atop the commanding heights of the economy with powers granted by the new financial, err, "regulation" bill. And as one of those "little people," let's just say that staring up at the soggy bottoms of those Gulliverian giants of mediocrity is about enough to make me lose my free lunch.

From the WSJ's "Triumph of the Regulators":

President Obama hailed the financial bill that House-Senate negotiators finally vouchsafed at 5:40 a.m. Friday, and no wonder. The bill represents the triumph of the very regulators and Congressmen who did so much to foment the financial panic, giving them vast new discretion over every corner of American financial markets.

Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, those Fannie Mae cheerleaders, played the largest role in writing the bill. Congressman Paul Kanjorski even offered a motion to memorialize it as the Dodd-Frank Act. It's as if Tony Hayward of BP were allowed to write new rules on deep water drilling.

The Federal Reserve, which promoted the housing mania and failed utterly in its core mission of monitoring Citigroup, will now have more power to regulate more financial institutions and more ability to dictate the allocation of credit.

The Treasury, which bailed out institutions willy-nilly without consistent rules, will now lead the Financial Stability Oversight Council that will have the arbitrary power to define which financial companies pose a "systemic risk" and which can be shut down without recourse to bankruptcy. Willy-nilly will now be the law.

And the SEC, which created the credit-ratings oligopoly and missed Bernie Madoff, will get new powers to decide how easy it should be for union pension funds to get their candidates on corporate proxy ballots.

Oh, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? They aren't touched at all, even as they continue to lose billions of taxpayer dollars each quarter.

In other words, our Washington rulers have taken 2,000 or so pages to double and triple down on the old system that failed. [Continued]