Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Jon Huntsman calls for transparency in targeting Wall Street behavior

Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman has put transparency at the center of his plan for reforming Wall Street.

According to a Bloomberg article,

“We’ve had implosions on Wall Street,” he said, in an interview with Bloomberg News yesterday. “We had bad behavior on Wall Street. We had lack of transparency on Wall Street. I believe they are, in some measure, responsible for a diminishment in trust.”...
By taking aim at Wall Street, Huntsman believes he can piece together a coalition of anti-bailout Republicans and anti- Wall Street independent voters in the fiscally conservative early voting state.

Last month, Huntsman released a plan that would cap the size of banks and impose new fees on the biggest financial institutions. In campaign appearances, he accuses his rivals of being beholden to their Wall Street donors, and he’s expressed support for the populist Occupy Wall Street protests....

“It’s a pretty smart tactic because Mr. Romney made a lot of money from big banks and it’s going to be hard for him to respond on this,” said Simon Johnson, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has been critical of the banking industry. 
Citing Romney’s ties to Wall Street, Huntsman, the son of a billionaire industrialist, raises questions about whether the former private equity investor would be able to stand up to the industry. 
“He would seem to be doing quite well with the Wall Street insiders,” Huntsman said. “If too big to fail is in fact an ongoing problem for this country, you’re going to need someone who can stand up and point out those deficiencies and do so without the additional pressure of an industry that built them up politically.” ...
It’s an unflattering portrait that Democrats hope will take hold. Obama’s allies have already begun painting Romney as more interested in supporting Wall Street than addressing the economic challenges facing the middle class.... 
The question is whether those attacks will resonate with Republican primary voters.... 
While the rest of the Republican field frequently promises to end all government bailouts, none have gone as far as Huntsman in introducing a specific plan to restructure the financial industry. 
His proposal, released on Nov. 28, caps bank size and total borrowing based on their assets as a percentage of gross domestic product. Those institutions that exceed the permitted size would pay a fee designed to help cover the cost to taxpayers of any future bailouts. Huntsman would also shut down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-backed mortgage lenders caught up in the housing meltdown, and repeal the Dodd- Frank Act passed by Congress to regulate the financial industry....

On the campaign trail, Huntsman’s rivals blame the financial crisis largely on Democratic leadership, while rarely mentioning the big banks that were at the center of the government bailout.... 
Huntsman accused his rivals of being hesitant to criticize banks because they don’t want to cut off a source of campaign contributions....
“They want to be able to point out the deficiencies in front of some crowds, but they want to take money from the banking sector,” said Huntsman. “They’re not going to get contributions from the banking sector if they’re specific about how they want to remedy the situation."

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