Nonpartisan Group Led by Nobel Winner Calls for Stronger Financial Reforms
By Matthew Jaffe
March 03, 2010 “ABC News” — Even as many Americans still struggle to recover from the country’s worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, another crisis — one that will be even worse than the current one — is looming, according to a new report from a group of leading economists, financiers, and former federal regulators.
In the report, the panel, that includes Rob Johnson of the United Nations Commission of Experts on Finance and bailout watchdog Elizabeth Warren, warns that financial regulatory reform measures proposed by the Obama administration and Congress must be beefed up to prevent banks from continuing to engage in high risk investing that precipitated the near collapse of the U.S. economy in 2008.
The report warns that the country is now immersed in a “doomsday cycle” wherein banks use borrowed money to take massive risks in an attempt to pay big dividends to shareholders and big bonuses to management — and when the risks go wrong, the banks receive taxpayer bailouts from the government.
“Risk-taking at banks,” the report cautions, “will soon be larger than ever.”
Without more stringent reforms, “another crisis — a bigger crisis that weakens both our financial sector and our larger economy — is more than predictable, it is inevitable,” Johnson says in the report, commissioned by the nonpartisan Roosevelt Institute.
The institute’s chief economist, Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz, calls the report “an important point of departure for a debate on where we are on the road to regulatory reform.”
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