San Francisco Obama.net)-The richest people of the United States of America usually represent less than the top one percent of the American population. And many of those men and women make their living on Wall Street. As much criticism has come Wall Street’s way in the last few years during the recession, the President of the United States Barack Obama was set to sign a new reform bill on Wall Street on Wednesday.
The changes Obama is implementing are the biggest changes the American financial system has seen since the days of the Great Depression in the 1930’s when Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced his New Deal reforms.
Just as Roosevelt made reforms to protect the interests of the citizens of the United States, President Obama is looking to accomplish the same thing. One week ago Barack Obama said that his new bill would be a “reform that will prevent the kind of shadowy deals that led to that crisis, reform that would never again put taxpayers on the hook for Wall Street’s mistakes.”
The new policies will lead to less bailouts for banks and corporations, more protection for the American people, and a simplifying of complicated financial procedures such as derivatives, as well as adding a middle person to facilitate the trades between financial corporations.
Last Thursday, the proposed bill by Obama was passed in the United States Senate by a vote of 60 to 39. Unfortunately, there had to be some compromises made to the bill in order for the Democrats to get the bill passes after a year of attempts. One compromise that had to be made was the allotment of banks on Wall Street to make a certain amount of investments that are considered risky. However, there are now going to be limits on how much a Wall Street bank can gamble on accounts of their own.
The Federal Reserve will see a new sector known as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that has the power to make new policies in order to protect the citizens of the United States from procedures in mortgages or by credit card companies that are not seen to be fair to the people of America.
Under Obama’s new reform bill, the Treasury Department will set new rules for the amount of money banks have to keep in their vaults to avoid any more crisis’ and make new procedures on how to close the larger financial corporations when they are falling apart.
With the leadership of President Barack Obama, the economic future of the United States is looking much brighter. As Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut said, “We made a promise in the fall of ’08 that we’d do everything in our power to see to it we’d never again put the America public in the position we were in September and early October 2008. And we have fulfilled that promise with this legislation.”
While Republicans did tend to disagree with the strength of the new changes that reform bill calls for, three Republicans did vote for the bill. And one Democrat, Russ Feingold from Wisconsin, did oppose Obama’s bill. While not at the level President Obama would like, this is still a good showing of bipartisanship in the United States Senate.
After a year of fighting for reform on Wall Street that would help protect the United States from ever seeing another economic catastrophe as the one of 2008, President Barack Obama has finally succeeded with his new bill. After signing the bill into law on Wednesday, President Obama can now safely tell the people of the United States of America that the fear of the financial firms of America ever causing the economy of the United States to crumble can be left in the past.
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