Sen. Chuck Schumer is known as a big advocate for Wall Street interests in his home state of New York.
It's worth reading this story chronicling his insatiable quest for Wall Street's campaign cash and his advocating for laws and regulations favorable to the industry -- many of which are the lax regulations faulted for the current financial crisis. For instance:
"They knew Schumer would support them," said one former Moody's executive, who asked not to be named because he still works in the industry. "He was their go-to guy," the executive said....
At that time, revenues for the agencies were skyrocketing. The housing market was robust, and Wall Street investment firms were paying the agencies to rate various mortgage-backed securities after first advising the firms -- and also collecting fees -- on how to package them to get high credit ratings.
It was an obvious conflict of interest, financial experts now say. Despite their high ratings, many of those securities, based on risky loans, would prove worthless, roiling markets and threatening financial institutions worldwide.
Schumer tries to play both sides -- talking like a populist progressive in public, and at times voting like one, but also reassuring the financial executives and protecting their interests.
Such a conflicting message and such inherent conflicts of interest -- a lawmaker soliciting industries for millions of dollars while sitting on the Senate committee that regulates them -- would be gone if we publicly financed our elections, which is why we continue to say that it's a critical part of the long term fix to this system.
UPDATE: TPM further analyzes Schumer's efforts to limit the regulation of the ratings agencies that profited heavily off of consulting lenders on repackaging their bonds and risky assets, while at the same time acting as the trusted judges of how safe those bonds were. A lot of conflicts of interests here that continue to be ignored. There's momentum to fix the financial conflicts... but we need to fix the political ones, too.
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