As Atrios Says - No One Could Have Predicted

Except of course, us DFHs. So much for public/private cooperation.

But in interviews, they also said that the insurance premiums are unaffordable for some who need the coverage - and that some would-be customers are skittish about the plans because federal lawsuits and congressional Republicans are trying to overturn the entire law.

& Wall Street, the heartless bastards who melted down & created the mess we are still living with, all of a sudden became real smart when it came to dealing with regulation.

The U.S. government, promising to make the system safer, buckled under many of the financial industry’s protests. Lawmakers spurned changes that would wall off deposit-taking banks from riskier trading. They declined to limit the size of lenders or ban any form of derivatives. Higher capital and liquidity requirements agreed to by regulators worldwide have been delayed for years to aid economic recovery.

“We continue to listen to the same people whose errors in judgment were central to the problem,” said John Reed, 71, a former co-chief executive officer of Citigroup Inc., who estimated only 25 percent of needed changes have been enacted. “I’m astounded because we basically dropped the world’s biggest economy because of an error in bank management.”

My emphasis.