Mike Konczal Gives FinReg Postmortem; Notes Media Schizophrenia

Mike Konczal joined Annie Lowrey yesterday on Bloggingheads to discuss financial reform in the wake of the Senate’s passage of the bill…

Mike outlines two key dichotomies that emerged from the bill passage, pointing out that before a bill even came to be, there was a split between “the Summerites and the Volckerites”: those who sided with Larry Summers and wanted to consolidate legal authority for regulators, and those who sided with Paul Volcker and wanted to see more structural changes. Now that the House and Senate have both passed their versions of the bill, there is a new split — what Mike calls the “schizophrenic response” in the media. “You had half the media talking about how… it was a brand new New Deal. And then you had the other half of the people saying … it’s just rearranging the chairs on the Titanic.”

Mike and Annie agree that the bill is very helpful in the midst of another crisis, but whether or not it prevents future crisis is less clear. So perhaps the Summerites won out over Volckerites. They go on to discuss how the bill came to be, the weird process the Senate took to pass it, Fannie and Freddie, and even the BP oil spill and Facebook privacy.

Check out the full discussion:

Read more on the topic:

“Make Markets Be Markets”
“How the Senate Financial Reform Bill Gained Strength”
“A Financial Reform Interview Recap”
“Progressive Values and Financial Reform“