President Barack Obama has chosen the place where the economic meltdown began to argue that it can never happen again and plead for legislation imposing stronger oversight on the financial industry. Without it, he says, America is doomed to repeat the past.
In a speech on Thursday at New York’s Cooper Union college, near Wall Street, Mr Obama was outlining the need for new financial regulations and explaining what the United States would be risking if the existing framework is allowed to remain in place unchanged.
Tighter regulations have become Mr Obama’s top priority after the passage of his health care overhaul, and Democrats are hoping to cash in on voter unhappiness over the Bush administration’s bailouts of financial institutions and use it against Republicans in the November congressional election. Republicans contend the current proposal would encourage risky behavior, not stop it.
Mr Obama spoke at Cooper Union as a presidential candidate in March 2008 and decried practices that he said too often rewarded financial manipulation instead of productivity and sound business practices.
‘I take no satisfaction in noting that my comments have largely been borne out by the events that followed,’ Mr Obama said in excerpts of his prepared remarks for Thursday, which the White House released several hours before the speech. ‘But I repeat what I said then because it is essential that we learn the lessons of this crisis, so we don’t doom ourselves to repeat it,’ he said.
The sweeping regulation, representing the broadest attempt to overhaul the US financial system since the 1930s, aims to prevent another crisis. Democrats are preparing to bring the Senate version of the bill up for debate, but solid Republican opposition has complicated the effort. The House passed its version of the bill in December. The bills would create a mechanism for liquidating large, interconnected financial firms considered too big to fail.
AP
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