Remember the 2008 econmic meltdown? Well, of course you do! You lost your job, your home, your 401k, and your child's college fund as a result. If you are a Tea Partier you probably blame it on Obama even though Obama didn't take office until 2009. If, instead, you are a rational human being, by now you know that a wildly un-regulated financial sector gambled with your money in high-risk investments because GET RICH QUICK WITH OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY is only a risk for the other people. This cavalier behavior caused the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression.
You voted for Obama because you wanted this fixed and wanted him to do what was neccesary to prevent the banksters from being able to do this again. In July of 2010, President Obama signed landmark legislation called Dodd-Frank. It was designed to bring some regulation to the Wild West Salloon Brawl known as Wall Street.
One key provision of the law is known as the "push-out" rule. Basically, it makes the banksters' risk their own. First a bit of refresher on the FDIC. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is a federal government agency that sells insurance to financial institutions to insure your deposits of up to $250,000. So, if the bank you have your money saved in gets in financial trouble, you can, in the very least get back what you put in (sans interest). Leading up to the financial meltdown of 2008, banks took advantage of this insurance to take high-risk investments with your money.
These high-risk investments came in the form of derivative trading. A derivative is the trading of an underlying financial entity. The most common of these involved in the 2008 Financial Meltdown was the trading of credit based derivatives such as collateral debt obligations, credit default swaps, and mortgage backed securities. To make matters simple the banksters were trading on your ability to pay your debts. Nothing terribly wrong with that, except in some of these arrangements traders make money if you defaulted, thus there is little incentive for financial institutions to make good investments (safe loans).
The trading of these derivatives became so popular that the demand went up for credit based derivatives. Now, the banksters had to make more loans to package together as credit derivatives. This is why housing loans were made to people the institutions knew would likely not be able to pay back (this is where that housing bust came from). And if something were to go wrong? Who cares? There was still the good old FDIC to insure the losses so customers could recoup some of their deposits (but not the interest you earned on those deposits). So, the banksters could gamble with your money, send the economy into a tailspin, while pocketing big bucks.
This is where the push-out rule comes in. The push-out rule still allows the banksters to gamble on high-risk derivatives, but not with FDIC insured accounts. As you can imagine the GET RICH QUICK WITH OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY addicts don't like that. They enjoy destroying the economy and driving you in the poor house, so long as they pocket a ton of cash while they are at it. So why would Congress be mean and stop their fun?
Now, the banksters are fighting back. In an eleventh hour maneuver, they have written a bill and got their allies in the GOP to stuff it in the government funding bill working its way through Congress. The bill would eliminate Dodd-Frank's push-out rule and let the good times roll again. And this is how the banksters and the GOP are plotting to trigger another economic meltdown.
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