Eric Cantor Still Claiming Wall Street is Over-Regulated
By Heather Thursday Dec 17, 2009 2:00pm
Is it asking too much that if you're a cable news host and you bring someone on specifically to answer a question, that you try to get them to actually answer it before they leave the set? Rick Sanchez frames this interview as Cantor being willing to respond Sanchez's comments about the repeal of Glass-Steagall and passing the Commodity Futures Modernization Act which prevented the derivatives market from being regulated. Of course Cantor is never willing to say whether it was a bad idea to get rid of Glass-Steagall or deregulate derivatives even though he admits financial institutions should have never been leveraged the way they were.
He obviously thinks we need less regulation when he's still singing the praises of the "entrepreneurial spirit" and "free markets". I guess he thinks they should be free to take down the world's economy again when we have another bubble because they still haven't been regulated. As our commenter spicegal pointed out, Cantor's got some conflicts of interest with his wife as well. It would be nice if someone in the media would ask him about her business dealings but I'm not holding my breath for that to happen any time soon either. I'm quite sure Cantor's just one more name on a very long list of Congressmen with similar scenarios.
SANCHEZ: We have spoken on this show so many times about some of the things that went wrong that put us in the situation that we are in now with this crisis with Wall Street and our economy, the repeal of Glass-Steagall which eventually allowed investment banks to act and get in cahoots with regular banks. We talked about the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which essentially allowed those default-tax swaps which were really schemes, they were -- they were selling nothing but - well, certainly nothing for the American people, and a lot for themselves on Wall Street.
And we have also talked about regulators who never got anything done because they were too busy looking the other way while people were doing things, because they wanted a job on Wall Street one day. That is what has been told to us from people on the inside, by regulators who were there, by experts, by economists.
So with that on the table, yesterday I get this tweet from GOP Whip Eric Cantor, and he suggests in the tweet, and that is why I wanted to have him on, that not Washington overregulation. Overregulation? And I am just sitting here thinking, and I think a lot of you all are as well, overregulation, isn't the problem underregulation?
