President Barack Obama gave a big speech yesterday. He was addressing the leaders of Wall Street and challenged them to join him in an effort to fix the problems that caused the financial crisis the world is facing today. The cartoon above addresses the same issue. The cartoonist thinks that this is a burning issue.What do you think?

Thanks to Wikicommons.

Question: Do you remember that recent financial crisis that was going to (play scary music) DESTROY THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT!?! (in case you don’t… crawl out from under your rock and check out US Democrazy’s past coverage).

Fortunately for us, politicians everywhere agreed to do everything possible to ensure that such a crisis did not happen again.

Unfortunately, these politicians cannot seem to agree on… what exactly “everything possible” means…

Like everything in Washington these days, reform of the financial and banking industry (which helped create the almighty mess we are stuck in) is in a partisan deadlock.

There was some progress made in 2009 when the House of Representatives passed a financial reform bill last December.

Since then, that bill has languished in the clutches of the US Senate (an organization about as fast as molasses up hill in January).

But HARK! (play triumphant music) all that is about to change!  A Senate version of the bill may be emerging!

The Wall Street Journal reports that a potential Senate bill, among other things, would place the Federal Reserve in charge of consumer protection in the financial markets.

(You can view the consumer protection part of the plan, spearheaded by Senator Chris Dodd, here…brought to you by Mother Jones).

Reform should be bringing out cheers, right? Well, some don’t seem to think this bill contains much reform at all.

The blog Calculated Risk snidely remarks on the proposal that

wasn’t the Fed already responsible for consumer financial protection?

Don’t think Calculated Risk are the only one who picked up on this.

Heather Booth, Executive Director of the Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), an alliance of organizations promoting changes in the way Wall Street us regulated, issued this statement on the Senate proposal:

The revised proposal does not provide what is needed to protect American families or the financial system as a whole: a strong, independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency

Yesterday, Paul Krugman, Noble winning economist, wrote in a similar vein that this bill

eliminates a key plank of the Obama administration’s proposals, the creation of a strong, independent agency protecting consumers.

Not only that but Mr. Krugman goes so far as to say that

it’s time to draw a line in the sand

and that no reform bill is better than

such a watered-down reform.

Now the question may be forming in your head (at least it did in ours), how could a reform bill, such as that passed by the House of Representatives, with support from the White House and many Americans become watered down?

Arianna Huffington, namesake of the Huffington Post, conjectures that the weakening of the bill was due to the banking lobby .

A couple of hundred million dollars later, and we’re left with this punch-to-the-gut of reform, from the top-line summary of Dodd’s plan: “the independent agency proposal would be dropped.”

Representative Barney Frank, a key player in the House of Representative’s reform, states the weak Senate bill is because

Procedurally, the Senate Republicans are killing this or watering it down,

We’ve taken a look at what the experts have said on this issue… perhaps it’s best we hear from those who will be most affected by this so-called reform. That would be YOU.

That’s right, we want you to go to the top right of this article, where it says “leave a comment”, click that spot and write your thoughts.  Otherwise we may just have to write them for you.

Got You Too… FDIC advances a proposal to penalize banks for risky practices.

I feel like I’m forgetting something…

Florida Grandmother Forgotten in Jail for 15 Days

Last Sunday, we saw TV cat fights involving lions, tigers and even President Obama!

That’s right, on Sunday President Obama had his catty claws out. In an interview he referred to America’s Wall Street bankers as a bunch of “fat cats”.

To make the name calling worse, it was only a day before Mr. Obama was scheduled to meet with these very same top bankers.

What was this meeting about (clearly not another friendly beer summit)?

In Obama’s own words:

America’s banks received extraordinary assistance from American taxpayers to rebuild their industry — and now that they’re back on their feet, we expect an extraordinary commitment from them to help rebuild our economy

Obama was having a hissy-fit at the bankers. He wants them to start lending money again so that businesses can start growing again and in turn hire people (again).

Now normally most people would jump at a chance to meet the President.  However Obama’s cold words and the cold weather kept some bankers at home.

Bad weather grounded the commercial flights for the CEO’s of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanly, as well as the Chariman of Citigroup.

The big question is will this meeting result in increased lending by the brow-beaten bankers?

Shahien Nasiripour, at the Huffington Post, doesn’t think so.

He could be wrong though.  After the meeting, Bank of America announced that it would increase loans to small and mid-sized businesses by $5 billion in 2010.

Who knows maybe those “fat cats” are cuter than people think?

The U.S. is all about new beginnings. And making mortgage lenders work, too.

Lesson learned: cold, hard cash is best not kept in the freezer. (Any old police office with the muchies is going to look there.)

Thanks to Wikicommons.

***UPDATE: Here are the Official Results***

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has been under a lot of stress lately. (We at USDemocrazy thinks it has something to do with fixing the tanking economy.)  Now it seems he has been passing this stress onto others.

The US Treasury has required major banks to undergo “Stress Tests” (like waiting in line at the DMV) to see if they are financially sturdy enough (i.e. have enough money) to stand on their own two feet without government crutches.

The results are in… sort of…

The Feds will not be releasing the official results until later today. Luckily, there have been a number of leaks to the press.

Geithner has announced the results will be “reassuring” … although anythingother than total disaster might seem reassuring in this economic climate.

Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Regional Financial, Sun Trust, KeyCorp,  Morgan Stanley, Fifth Third, P.N.C. and GMAC need more money. No surprises here.

Among those banks tough enough to survive are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, MetLife, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of New York Mellon, and American Express. (You can now open the champagne and charge it to your AmEx card.)

What happens to those stressed out banks? Does the government issue Valium?

Well, it seems the banks get one month to put a plan together for raising cash.

Once the banks get their stress report cards, the pundit class will weigh in with their interpretation of the grades.  The NY Times has a great collection of experts giving their two cents worth.  Arianna Huffington is as vocal as ever with her opinion,

“The fact that the stress test results to be released on Thursday are unlikely to show the full extent of the sickness of our financial system is one more symptom that Obama’s economic team needs to be put in quarantine…”

We’ll see down the road how accurate these tests were.  So what do y’all think? Are you and the banks stressed enough?

Hey amigo, where’d ya get that gun… From the US!

What’s the prognosis, doc? Some stocks with a side of t-bonds.

Ron Paul meets Sacha Baron Cohen.

I was expecting an interview on Austrian economics. So, that didn’t turn out that way. But, by the time he started pulling his pants down, I … What in (inaudible) is going on here? I ran out of the room.