McCain says "Regulators were asleep at the switch"

- At a campaign rally in Iowa, Sen. John McCain said financial "regulators were asleep at the switch."

http://link.latimes.com/r/IO3TIN/UTZVK/95GU6M/OL1G/XJE67/1G/t

your fellow Repubs yanked them outta there!

after the Rethugs cut all their regulatory powers.

We need regulators to begin with though.

The * Admin shanked the operator and broke the handle.

But Mr. Greenspan wasn’t the only top official who put ideology above public protection. Consider the press conference held on June 3, 2003 — just about the time subprime lending was starting to go wild — to announce a new initiative aimed at reducing the regulatory burden on banks. Representatives of four of the five government agencies responsible for financial supervision used tree shears to attack a stack of paper representing bank regulations. The fifth representative, James Gilleran of the Office of Thrift Supervision, wielded a chainsaw.

Also in attendance were representatives of financial industry trade associations, which had been lobbying for deregulation. As far as I can tell from press reports, there were no representatives of consumer interests on the scene.

Two months after that event the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, one of the tree-shears-wielding agencies, moved to exempt national banks from state regulations that protect consumers against predatory lending. If, say, New York State wanted to protect its own residents — well, sorry, that wasn’t allowed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/21/opinion/21krugman.htm...