Friday, June 28, 2013

The US as a Global Risk Generator

By Kevin Gallagher

The U.S. economy continues to have a hard time recovering from the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

So the last thing one would expect the U.S. government to do is to engage in policies that open the floodgates to severe risks in financial markets once again.

And yet, that is precisely what's going on.

For all the attention that is paid to the Federal Reserve's "tapering," what Washington has in its crosshairs is something quite different.

It is putting massive pressure on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Unless concerned policymakers — and the public at large — act quickly to counter that pressure, the disastrous past — a financial industry running amok — may well be not just be the United States' national, but our common global future.

How is this even possible?

Even though the U.S. Congress passed the Dodd-Frank financial reform law a few years ago as a bulwark against reoccurring financial crises, the legislation actually left most of the key decisions — the actual detailed rule-making to rein in the financial industry — for later.

Read the rest at The Globalist.

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