Comment Text:
“I am Bonnie Breckenrdige, and here is how my family and I were affected by the financial crisis. Even though I don't have much in stocks, I have still been greatly effected by the crash of the economy that derivatives and other risky practices caused. I followed the general advice of pretty much every politician to do all I could to better myself with education. After 30 years in my field I felt I had a lot to give to young people interested in the same field. I achieved an MFA in 2008 in order to get a good teaching job in a university, just in time for the economy to crash and for school budgets to be cut so drastically the jobs disappeared. So instead of having a good job that also gave service to future generations, I am in debt and struggling to make ends meet, like so many other Americans. While banks got bailed out by tax payers, the tax payers themselves lost their jobs, their homes, their health insurance and much of their hope both for themselves and for their children's future.
I never again want to be called on to bail out big corporations and Wall Street banks for irresponsible “heads I win, tails you lose” gambles and then watch so many hard working Americans left to twist in the wind. It is not just the monetary price working class Americans have paid but the psychological cost of being stripped of so much they had worked for and the inability to find work that even comes close to what they once had. On top of every thing else the very businesses we bailed out are still refusing to hire people who have been out of work for more than a year, as if it was their fault for not being good enough or not trying hard enough. What a slap in the face to the very people who bailed them out! It is extremely difficult to pull oneself up by ones bootstraps when those very bootstraps have been stolen by irresponsible bankers and corporations. If those business entities are permitted to carry on "business as usual" we will continue on the same cycles of boom and bust that, thanks to deregulation, have become the norm in our economic system.
Effective oversight of the $700 trillion global derivatives market is a key to meaningful reform. Because this market is inherently global, risks can be transferred around the world with the touch of a button. The proposed guidance you have issued on cross-border application of Dodd-Frank derivatives rules shows that you understand the importance of this issue. But the proposal contains multiple loopholes that could allow foreign affiliates of Wall Street banks to escape regulation. Big U.S. banks and other major U.S. derivatives users are global corporations with hundreds if not thousands of foreign affiliates. If we don’t regulate them everywhere, we can’t regulate them anywhere. Please make this guidance stronger to ensure that new Dodd-Frank derivatives protections will directly apply to the full global activities of all important participants in the U.S. derivatives markets.
