{"id":298,"date":"2009-09-15T10:14:49","date_gmt":"2009-09-15T10:14:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.the-finance-zone.co.uk\/?p=298"},"modified":"2009-09-15T10:14:49","modified_gmt":"2009-09-15T10:14:49","slug":"obama-urging-financial-overhaul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/2009\/09\/15\/obama-urging-financial-overhaul\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama urging financial overhaul"},"content":{"rendered":"

US President Barack Obama is calling on Congress to approve an overhaul of the US regulatory regime.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a speech to mark one year since the collapse of Lehman Brothers bank, he will mount a vigorous defence of his administration’s economic policies.<\/p>\n

The US president will focus on “the need to take the next series of steps” in regulatory reform, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.<\/p>\n

Mr Obama’s team have argued that they staved off a second Great Depression.<\/p>\n

Mr Obama is giving the speech in New York, at Federal Hall on Wall Street, where George Washington was inaugurated as the first US president.<\/p>\n

‘Money talks’<\/strong><\/p>\n

The White House would give the central bank, the Federal Reserve, new powers over huge financial firms and the ability to seize banks whose collapse could threaten the economy.<\/p>\n

Those and other rules that have been proposed have been tied up in Congress, which has been bogged down with Mr Obama’s divisive healthcare reform proposals.<\/p>\n

Mr Obama also wants a new watchdog, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, for products like mortgages, car loans and credit cards and the Federal Trade Commission will gain new powers to protect consumers.<\/p>\n

That, and more powers for the Securities and Exchange Commission, has also faced opposition from the banking industry.<\/p>\n

“I’m very pessimistic that we will do enough,” said Nobel award-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, speaking to BBC business editor Robert Peston on Newsnight.<\/p>\n

“If you listen to the discussion, you see the push-back from the financial sector,” he added. “In American democracy, money talks. We have five lobbyists for every Congressman in the financial industry.”<\/p>\n

Verge of collapse<\/strong><\/p>\n

The White House has said its massive $787bn (\u00a3472bn) stimulus package, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed earlier this year, has created up to 1.1m jobs and boosted economic activity.<\/p>\n

“When I walked in, the banking system, the financial system was under the verge of collapse,” Mr Obama said on Sunday in an interview on the 60 Minutes television show.<\/p>\n

“The reason we did so was that every credible Democratic and Republican economist at the time when we came in said if we don’t have a stimulus of some sort, then this is potentially going to get a lot worse,” he said.<\/p>\n

The White House has said it boosted US GDP by 2-3% between April and June.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

US President Barack Obama is calling on Congress to approve an overhaul of the US regulatory regime. In a speech<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[16,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-finance","category-obama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}