Federal Reserve Feels the Surge of New Power

Federal Reserve to gain power under plan

"The Federal Reserve, already arguably the most powerful agency in the U.S. government, will get sweeping new authority to regulate any company whose failure could endanger the U.S. economy and markets under the Obama administration's regulatory overhaul plan.
The final plan due to be released on Wednesday -- which originally aimed to streamline and consolidate banking and securities regulation in one or two agencies -- now is expected to sidestep most jurisdictional disputes and simply impose across the board standards to be applied by all financial regulators, according to administration and industry sources.
The most likely candidate for elimination is the Office of Thrift Supervision, whose failure to detect and forestall problems at Countrywide, IndyMac, Washington Mutual and other freewheeling mortgage lenders is thought to have contributed to the financial crisis.
The decision to concentrate sweeping new powers at the already overstretched Fed is not without controversy. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, chairman of the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, which must approve any regulatory overhaul, has raised objections to that approach, and so has Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila C. Bair. "

And then my man-crush financial homeboy Timmy Geit chimes in: ""What we're trying to do is focus on the things that were at the core of the problems we saw in the crisis," said Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner at a Time Warner Economic Summit in New York on Monday."

""When you have too many people involved, there's an accountability problem," he said. "At the core of making the system stronger is to give one place in the system clear accountability, responsibility and authority for preventing future crises."

The problem with Geit's stance, is that it is exactly backwards. Preventing future crises is impossible, unless they ceased to exist and stopped inflating the money supply into total worthless oblivion. Thanks for the inflationary depression.