Financial Reform Can Be Amusing. Just Ask Matt Taibbi.

By his own admission, Matt Taibbi was amazed by what he unearthed while reporting his latest Rolling Stone article, Wall Street’s War.

“I was physically bumping into these guys in the hallways and the offices of some of the Senators,” he said of the 2,000 lobbyists the financial services industry employs in Washington, DC. 

As for the “other side”—Americans for Financial Reform—they have only 60 lobbyists on the Hill. “And they’re all volunteers,” Taibbi provided.

The financial regulatory reform bill that recently passed in the House and Senate will go into conference soon, where Taibbi suspects it will be watered down. He conceded, however, that the bill contains some good stuff, including a movement to find out exactly who was on the receiving end of trillions of dollars of secret loans that the Federal Reserve doled out in 2008.

“The original Federal Reserve Act does not allow Congress to look in the books of the Fed, ever,” said Taibbi. “So there have been attempts, going back decades, to open up the Fed’s books. They’ve all failed.”

This time around, a group led by Reps. Ron Paul and Alan Grayson in the House and Bernie Sanders in the Senate finally succeeded in getting an amendment through to allow for a one-time only audit of the Fed, from 2007 through the date the bill is passed. “But it’s only going to be that one time,” Taibbi added.

A new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will also be created as a result of this bill; it will do things like prevent credit card companies, for example, from inserting hidden fees into their contracts. Republicans opposing this agency’s formation claimed it would negatively impact small businesses, but that was only because, as Taibbi observed, “They couldn’t say, ‘We want to keep screwing our customers.’”

When it came to this bill, Taibbi said there were essentially three groups among members of Congress: Republicans who were against everything, and basically lobbying on behalf of Wall Street; Democrats trying to split the difference between what Wall Street wanted and what they could sell their constituents; and “the real good guys,” like Senators Kaufman, Brown, Levin, and Sanders, who actually got stuff done.
Shelby
After acknowledging the bill’s importance, Imus confessed it makes his hair hurt to think about it, and that he can only read Taibbi’s articles because they include terms like “elderly Sumo wrestler in drag” when referring to Senator Richard Shelby.

Taibbi believes the uncomfortable role of lobbyists in Washington will be further revealed because of the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. “Everybody is in bed with oil companies in Washington,” he said, adding, “If you have enough money to lobby the right people, it kind of doesn’t matter whether you have safety procedures in place or not.”

But as long as no lobbyists are employed to prevent Taibbi from saying icky things about people in power, Imus will be just fine.

-Julie Kanfer