Reporter's Notebook

Paul Leonard can be reached at pleonard@vbjusa.com

Financial reform now

Yesterday, I received an email from the company that supplies my auto insurance, urging me to call my senators to oppose the implementation of the so-called Volcker Rule, named for former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and which would limit the most-egregious speculative dealings of certain financial institutions.

Instead, I plan to do the opposite. I urge our readers to call their representatives in support of the full financial reform bill now being considered by the U.S. Senate.

While some readers may disagree, the reasons for making this call are not political. Instead, this column in support of financial reform is simply an acknowledgment of the events of the recent past.

It may be easy to forget in a time of resurgent stock prices and improved investor confidence the lessons learned from the financial meltdown. Such is the nature of the cyclical free market system, full of its ups and downs.

But for Southwest Washington business owners and workers still struggling after losing the lion’s share of their investments, their vital lines of credit and in some cases, their membership in the American middle class, there is no forgetting the loss of hard-earned capital as a result of the unchecked speculative dealings of certain financial institutions.

The bailouts of 2007-8 changed everything. There is no turning back the clock to the heady days of the 1990s and 2000s, when American ingenuity was replaced by the cannibalization of wealth, with CEOs doling out millions in bonuses while their firms dived into the red.

Common sense reform of our financial system means an end to taxpayer-funded bailouts of institutions which took irresponsible bets on the markets and lost. It means an end to the practices laid-out in the recent federal indictment against Goldman Sachs, accused of profiting from market positions taken opposite of the interests of its own clients.

Currently, lobbyists representing Wall Street interests are pushing to delay debate on the bill, a bi-partisan effort nearly two years in the making.

So I urge you to call senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell – two likely supporters of the legislation – to tell them you support their efforts to reintroduce the ultimately-American virtue of “fair play” back into the U.S. financial system.