- "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."
It means that the Secretary of the Treasury (Henry Paulson now & who knows who in the next administration) will have total control over the bailout funds. His decisions are non-reviewable by anyone; there's no oversight -- not by another administration agency, not by the court system. As a friend of mine says, "its the Patriot Act for the economy."
Robert Kuttner has an interesting article in The American Prospect. He says, "The differences between this proposed bailout and the three closest historical equivalents are immense. When the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of the 1930s pumped a total of $35 billion into U.S. corporations and financial institutions, there was close government supervision and quid pro quos at every step of the way. Much of the time, the RFC became a preferred shareholder and often appointed board members. The Home Owners Loan Corporation, which eventually refinanced one in five mortgage loans, did not operate to bail out banks but to save homeowners. And the Resolution Trust Corporation of the 1980s, created to mop up the damage of the first speculative mortgage meltdown, the savings and loan collapse, did not pump in money to rescue bad investments; it sorted out good assets from bad after the fact, and made sure to purge bad executives as well as bad loans. And all three of these historic cases of public recapitalization were done without suspending judicial review."
Bailout or no, we need to carefully watch both candidates and parties for their positions on this and to ensure that the oversight that's been missing is re-instated and that adequate supervision is established going forward.
No comments:
Post a Comment