Of Financial Oversight, Meteor Strikes, And Modern Barn Construction

Up late tonight, but noticed this over at Atrios's place:

The Obama administration plans to move quickly to tighten the nation’s financial regulatory system.

Officials say they will make wide-ranging changes, including stricter federal rules for hedge funds, credit rating agencies and mortgage brokers, and greater oversight of the complex financial instruments that contributed to the economic crisis.

This should have been done, oh, never because this never should have been needed to be done in the first place. Remember kids, this all started with Citigroup and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which overturned Glass-Steagall, which allowed this mess to happen in the first place.

Clinton signed it into law. Bush removed nearly all the oversight from what was left in the system. It's badly needed regulatory oversight, but it's not just closing the barn door after the horses have escaped the barn, worrying about regulatory oversight right now is the equivalent of rebuilding the barn door just so you can close the damn thing at some unspecified point in the future after the barn has been hit by a meteor and not only killed the horses but flattened every building in the county.

Yes, at some point that barn door will be needed again. That's step #22,347 at this point. Step #1 is realizing that there is no barn anymore. Either Obama doesn't understand that, or he understands it all too well and he's doing what he's capable of doing at this point and getting it out of the way now.

And really, the scary part is that the horses being the financial institutions to be regulated at this point, it's really like the meteor was an evil necromantic meteor that killed the horses and raised them from the dead as Zombie Bank Horses. Zombie Bank Horses that hunger for billions in bailout money (and maybe brains.)

Yeah, I'm going to bed.