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April 22, 2010 at 08:00 PM
During his speech in New York today, April 22, President Obama pushed Wall Street to support the financial services reform package. Obama said that “I am here because I believe that these reforms are, in the end, not only in the best interest of our country, but in the best interest of our financial sector.” Obama went on to say that “We need to enact updated, common sense reforms to ensure accountability on Wall Street.”
Obama noted that a year ago, the nation was losing 750,000 jobs per month, but today, he said, “we are adding jobs…and the economy is growing fast.” The U.S. has experienced the “fastest turnaround in growth in three decades, but there’s more work to do,” he said, adding that the nation “cannot have the same weaknesses as before.”.One of the most significant contributors to the financial crisis, he said, was “born of the failure of responsibility–from Wall Street all the way to Washington–that brought down many of the world’s largest financial firms and nearly dragged our economy into a second Great Depression.”
Obama then laid out four areas that financial reform would tackle. First, Senator Christopher Dodd’s (D-Connecticut’s) financial services reform bill, Obama said, would “create what we did not have before, and that is a way to protect the financial system and the broader economy and American taxpayers in the event that a large financial firm begins to fail.” The bill would also enact what’s known as the Volcker Rule, he said, which “places some limits on the size of banks and the kinds of risks that banking institutions can take.”
