Marsha Blackburn Quotes
The Dodd Bill does very little to reduce financial risks. What it will do is make Wall Street even more the servant of bureaucrats in Washington and the political party in power. That is not in the best interests of the American people.
Blackburn, Marsha. Congressional Record. Government Printing Office, 2010.
For many general government regulations—labor, environment, non discrimination—the small business has a proportionately heavier burden of compliance. So large businesses have always been able to count on small business to lobby against regulation and for deregulation. However, when it comes to financial regulation such as the Dodd-Frank regulations essentially apply to large businesses. As a matter of fact, small businesses were on many ways the most frequent victims of the large banks and investment bank excesses in the Meltdown of 2008. Before most of the regulations could even take effect, the financial industry was already trying to get small business to lobby to roll back the protective regulations preventing future meltdowns and bank failure resulting from loose regulation and greedy irresponsible financial industry behavior. The President campaigned to convince the small business not to support the finance industry over their usual “knee jerk” reaction to any regulation.
The Dodd Frank bill was designed, in the aftermath of the large bank induced meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession, to regulate the banking industry so that no bank would be “too big to fail”. However, although the bill placed many restrictions on the banks to prevent much of their risky economic behavior, which the banks complained inhibited their growth and profitability. However, the bill did not put any limits on the size of the large banks and their critical proportion of the U. S. Financial System. If a bank was large enough, the government did not dare allow the bank to fail regardless of how profligate the Bank had been with its depositors’ money. So the shareholders made big money from the Bank’s risky behavior if it turned out well, and if not the taxpayers had to bail the banks out, because they were too big to fail without causing much of the rest of the country to also fail. Warren and others wanted a simple solution. Break up the large banks into smaller ones and then if any one of the small units makes poor investments, the bank could fail and other than its shareholders and creditors, the effect would not be so serious that the government could not allow the bank to go into bankruptcy. Mismanaged banks could fail like other mismanaged companies and not take down much or the rest of the country with them. But the banks lobbied to prevent that, and by 2014, 6 years after the taxpayers had to bail out banks that were too big to fail, many of the banks were twice as large as they were when they were already too big to fail.
Marsha Blackburn is an American politician and businesswoman serving as the senior United States Senator from Tennessee. A member of the Republican Party, Blackburn served in the U.S. House for Tennessee's 7th congressional district from 2003 to 2019, and as a state senator from 1999 to 2003. On November 6, 2018, she became the first woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate from Tennessee, defeating former Democratic Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen. Blackburn became the state's senior senator in January 2021 when Lamar Alexander retired from the Senate. She is the most junior Republican who is the senior senator from their state. Blackburn was a supporter of the Tea Party movement, and has been described as staunchly conservative.
