President Barack Obama will speak in New York on Monday, addressing the government’s role in the financial markets and pushing for regulatory reform on Wall Street. Since the near financial collapse last fall financial regulations remain the same and though much talk about changing rules for the financial markets has been made, no policy has been put in place to date.
Obama’s speech comes on the one-year anniversary of the Lehman Brother debacle, which sparked a tailspin in the nation’s financial markets. In his speech, Obama is expected to back opinions and comments recently made by other regulators.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner stressed last week that there should be a greater urgency to push regulatory reform of the financial markets.
Some of the highlight points of the plan call for the creation of a new federal consumer agency to oversee financial products, providing the Federal Reserve with additional authority to monitor risk in the financial sector and working toward streamlining the regulatory system of banks on a whole.
Such a proposal has a long way to go before making it through Congress and since June has already seen proposed changes to many of its details.
The Senate Banking Committee is creating a proposal that is expected to provide the Federal Reserve with much less power than the Treasury’s proposal and may seek for aggressive consolidation of the government’s financial regulating agencies.
Many recent reports have stated that the Obama administration intends on pushing financial regulatory reform policy into place by year’s end.
Meanwhile, a year after the near collapse on Wall Street, big banks and broker are already increasing their risk appetite. In the fall of 2008, firms such as Goldman Sachs nearly took their trading activity of risky assets to a halt.
However, in the second quarter of 2009 Goldman Sachs’ trading revenue represented nearly 50 percent of its total revenue for the period.
