Rebel Traders - Stock Market and Economic Analysis

Today President Obama travelled to New York City to talk about financial reform at Cooper Union’s Great Hall, founded in 1859 by Peter Cooper, one of America’s richest businessmen of the time.

It has been nearly 2 years since the financial crisis began. And in that 2 years not one corrective action has taken place, not one.

You can’t say that the credit card reform act was a good thing. It simply allowed every bank and other credit card issuer to raise interest rates to levels that even a loan shark would be envious of before the law went into effect, essentially trapping credit card users at the new higher rates.

Health Care Reform? With many of the provisions not even becoming law until 2014 this too will serve as a license for insurance companies to raise premiums and create other havoc over the next 4 years. Again, another law that will enable Wall Street firms and insurance companies to bilk the American people for whatever they can get before the law becomes active.

Now in the case of financial reform the government has accomplished nothing in the past 2 years. Lots of talk, but nothing done. So today the President spoke once again about the need to reform the financial system. Unfortunately, his statements were just as weak as the rhetoric spoken 2 years ago.

Wall Street lobbyists have twisted the arm of Washington throughout this entire time to keep a blind eye facing Wall Street. It is only because of public outrage over the destruction of the economy, at the hands of Wall Street, does the administration even talk about reform at all.

In all of it’s lack of anything meaningful glory… I present the President of the United States.

Be sure to check out my comments throughout the following transcript.

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The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

April 22, 2010

Remarks by the President on Wall Street Reform

Cooper Union, New York, New York

11:50 A.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you very much.  Everybody, please have a seat.  Thank you very much.  Well, thank you.  It is good to be back.  (Applause.)  It is good to be back in New York, it is good to be back in the Great Hall at Cooper Union.  (Applause.)

We’ve got some special guests here that I want to acknowledge.  Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney is here in the house.  (Applause.)  Governor David Paterson is here.  (Applause.)  Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.  (Applause.)  State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli is here.  (Applause.)  The Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg.  (Applause.)  Dr. George Campbell, Jr., president of Cooper Union.  (Applause.)  And all the citywide elected officials who are here.  Thank you very much for your attendance.

RT: Mayor Bloomberg, the guy who has been moving funds to foreign tax havens. See Bloomberg’s Offshore Millions

It is wonderful to be back in Cooper Union, where generations of leaders and citizens have come to defend their ideas and contest their differences.  It’s also good to be back in Lower Manhattan, a few blocks from Wall Street.  (Laughter.)  It really is good to be back, because Wall Street is the heart of our nation’s financial sector.

Now, since I last spoke here two years ago, our country has been through a terrible trial.  More than 8 million people have lost their jobs.  Countless small businesses have had to shut their doors.  Trillions of dollars in savings have been lost — forcing seniors to put off retirement, young people to postpone college, entrepreneurs to give up on the dream of starting a company.  And as a nation we were forced to take unprecedented steps to rescue the financial system and the broader economy.

And as a result of the decisions we made — some of which, let’s face it, were very unpopular — we are seeing hopeful signs.  A little more than one year ago we were losing an average of 750,000 jobs each month.  Today, America is adding jobs again.  One year ago the economy was shrinking rapidly.  Today the economy is growing.  In fact, we’ve seen the fastest turnaround in growth in nearly three decades.

RT: With enough taxpayer money one can buy anything, even economic data. How will it look once the pot runs dry?

But you’re here and I’m here because we’ve got more work to do.  Until this progress is felt not just on Wall Street but on Main Street we cannot be satisfied.  Until the millions of our neighbors who are looking for work can find a job, and wages are growing at a meaningful pace, we may be able to claim a technical recovery — but we will not have truly recovered.  And even as we seek to revive this economy, it’s also incumbent on us to rebuild it stronger than before.  We don’t want an economy that has the same weaknesses that led to this crisis.  And that means addressing some of the underlying problems that led to this turmoil and devastation in the first place.
Now, one of the most significant contributors to this recession was a financial crisis as dire as any we’ve known in generations — at least since the ’30s.  And that crisis was born of a failure of responsibility — from Wall Street all the way to Washington — that brought down many of the world’s largest financial firms and nearly dragged our economy into a second Great Depression.

It was that failure of responsibility that I spoke about when I came to New York more than two years ago — before the worst of the crisis had unfolded.  It was back in 2007.  And I take no satisfaction in noting that my comments then have largely been borne out by the events that followed.  But I repeat what I said then because it is essential that we learn the lessons from this crisis so we don’t doom ourselves to repeat it.  And make no mistake, that is exactly what will happen if we allow this moment to pass — and that’s an outcome that is unacceptable to me and it’s unacceptable to you, the American people.  (Applause.)

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