Why Elizabeth Warren should be the next president
12/23/14

...The 2008 financial crisis, not terrorism or any other recent threat, posed the greatest risk to this country since the Cold War.

...A champion of the free market, even Greenspan acknowledged that not only did he not see the crash, but certain aspects of deregulation that he and others espoused actually helped cause this financial catastrophe.

If you feel this vantage point is merely “populist” hyperbole and Warren’s position on the spending deal isn’t warranted, then read what David Ignatius wrote in a 2008 Washington Post article about Hank Paulson’s real time view of the crisis:

"What's agonizing for Paulson is that he says he saw the storm clouds gathering two years ago when he became Treasury secretary…

He also warned about the growing use of derivatives -- financial instruments so complicated that they confuse even the people who buy and sell them -- and how they posed a fundamental risk to the markets.

"…If Bear Stearns had been allowed to collapse, for example, what would a bankruptcy judge have done with the billions of dollars in derivatives contracts -- and what would the other parties in these contracts have done in assessing their potential losses?" $22 trillions of dollars in lost wealth later, has our country learned the pitfalls of allowing Wall Street to engage in the same behavior that led to 2008? According to Warren in an NPR interview, the recent bill exemplified America’s dangerously short-term memory:

"Republicans slipped in a provision at the last minute that would let derivatives traders on Wall Street gamble with taxpayer money and then get bailed out by the government when their risky bets threaten to blow up our financial system.

“You know, it was literally never introduced in the Senate. It had no hearings. There was no discussion about this. And let's keep in mind about this provision, this is a provision that Citigroup lobbyists literally wrote. And then, just to make sure that everybody got the point, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan, personally made phone calls to House members to push for this change.

...America needs a president who isn’t intimidated by Wall Street. We need a president willing to save Wall Street from itself and save the American people from another future filled with economic catastrophes and bailouts.

Elizabeth Warren, not Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush, should be president in 2016.

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/presidential-campaign/227904-why-elizabeth-warren-should-be-the-next-president