Crisis? Yeah, Right. Sure.

If this were a "real" crisis, and the legislation proposed were actually designed to meet it--as opposed, say, to a carefully engineered plan to drown social spending in a bathtub, e.g.--there would be a major (and fiercely disputed) provision in the 'corrective' legislation to undo, or to repair, the circumstances or conditions that LED to such a "crisis."

In the current case, this would mean repealing Gramm/Leach/Bliley, restoring the old Glass-Steagall regulations, and returning to the stock-purchase leverage requirements which obtained PRIOR to Raygun/Greenspan/Clenis et al.

To the extent that there is no such provision in any such legislation, you may judge the seriousness of either the "crisis" or the "legislation" as accordingly deficient.

That's the bottom line. Anything else is Kabuki, designed to distract and amuse the rubes...

Here's part of a recent Kevin Phillips' (April) 'phillipic' on the subject:

For this discussion, I would like to concentrate on a central part of my thesis: the argument that a fair part of the U.S. peril stems from the tandem evolution since the 1980s of 1) a massive growth in public and private debt from $10 trillion to nearly $50 trillion; 2) the replacement of manufacturing by finance (by 2003 some 20-21% of U.S. GDP) as the dominant sector of the U.S. economy; 3) the use of debt by the financial sector - private financial debt soared more than any other category - to massively leverage its economic emergence speculation and wealth; and 4) the underwriting of financial sector emergence by Washington through roughly a dozen bail-outs since the early 1980s and the waves of liquidity provided by Alan Greenspan and now Bernanke.