Legal Commentary

Jim Cramer Analyzes the Proposed New Banking Rules

By Jim Lindgren

During the second half-hour of Mad Money on CNBC tonight, Jim Cramer has a revealing criticism of the Obama Administration?s proposed banking rules.

He concludes that the collapse was not the result of proprietary trading by banks, but rather mainly because of bad real estate loans. Cramer sees the proposal as targeting those who are making more money than Obama thinks they should.

Cramer does not point out the obvious: few lawyers and politicians worked as hard as Barack Obama to get banks to lower their lending standards (though to be fair, Obama also promoted Illinois legislation that prohibited some forms of lending fraud).

Obama went from being the lawyer for ACORN, to ?the Senator from ACORN? (as he was sometimes called in Illinois in 2007 and 2008), to the presidency. He pushed ACORN?s agenda in the Illinois legislature, and he pushed ACORN?s agenda in the US Senate. It shouldn?t be surprising that he has taken up a more sophisticated version of the ACORN-SEIU campaign against bankers, just as he did as a lawyer in the 1990s.

The show is being rebroadcast at 11pm ET Monday night.

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on January 26, 2010 (boomark / email).