President Barack Obama on Wednesday signed into law the most sweeping overhaul of U.S. financial-market regulations since the Great Depression, marking the conclusion of an effort to craft a legislative response to the 2008 financial crisis.
Mr. Obama pitched the measure as a major step toward correcting the problems that contributed to that crisis and the recession that followed.
“For years, our financial sector was governed by antiquated and poorly enforced rules that allowed some to game the system and take risks that endangered the entire economy,” Mr. Obama said.
The new law, he said, would better protect consumers, empower investors and bring transparency to dark corners of the financial markets.
“The American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street’s mistakes,” Mr. Obama said. “There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts. Period.”
The wide-ranging law will touch every corner of the financial universe, curtailing certain risky activities of the nation’s largest financial firms, affecting how average Americans obtain credit cards and mortgages, and transforming the way regulators work to assess and respond to potential flash points in the economy.
But like most of the Obama administration’s legislative victories, the financial overhaul legislation succeeded with only narrow Republican support. Mr. Obama specifically thanked the three Senate Republicans—Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine—for their support.
(Source: Wall Street Journal)
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And it was exactly the New Deal that kept us in the GREAT Depression longer than had the govt stayed out of it. The problem was that FDR the socialist wanted to do as much damage as possible.