Rachel Maddow talked to Sherrod Brown about the financial crisis and outrage over the AIG bonuses. Brown stated how important it is that people have some confidence in government, in Wall Street and the banking system. Although Brown didn't think that the outrage over the bonuses was unwarranted he noted that there are bigger issues that need to be addressed.
One being looking into why AIG passed billions of taxpayer funds onto financial institutions such as Société Générale, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs and made them whole when that was not necessary to stabilize the financial industry.
He stressed what Congress needs to do next.
Brown: Yeah Congressional oversight needs to be aggressive. We need to begin to fix those things that were broken starting you know months and months and months ago and years ago in the Bush administration. But we also need to move quickly as Chairman Dodd and others in the banking committees in both Houses, I sit on the Senate Banking Committee, that we need to do to rebuild this regulatory structure.
We had a strong regulatory structure that came out of the Depression. We had no real financial failures in the next fifty years until the beginning of the Reagan years when they deregulated. Look what happened with the Savings and Loan crisis. Look what happened with more deregulation with Enron. Look what happened with more deregulation in some of these hedge funds. And now look what's happened in the last six months. That's directly a result of deregulation.
We need to rebuild this regulatory structure which will last another fifty, sixty, seventy years. You do it right so we don't have these kinds of hits to ultimately to American workers that is destroying the middle class in this country and that's our most important work to build that long term and get our economy and a financial structure much more sound than it's been in the last twenty years.
Well, what's the hold up Senator? Why hasn't the Congress already started to act and get some regulation in place over these markets? I've heard a lot of talk about new regulations from the President, Barney Frank and now you, but where's the action?
