President Obama wants to declare a truce in his war on the business community. And, well, he might. For one thing, he has won almost all of the ground attainable between now and the November congressional elections. His health care “reform” is law of the land, and his financial-sector regulation bill was passed by the Senate on Thursday and awaits his signature.
Although each of these tomes is more than 2,000 pages long, they are mere barebones outlines, to be fleshed out by thousands of regulators. House speaker Nancy Pelosi, a San Francisco Democrat, said of the health care bill, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” And one of the co-authors of the financial regulation bill (“finreg” in the new jargon), retiring Senator Chris Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut, added to bankers’ uncertainty by observing, “We won’t know the full results of what we have done until the very institutions we have created, the regulations we have suggested and provided for are actually tested…. All we can do is … hope that good people will be appointed who will attract other good people…”.
