WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama prodded Congress on Saturday to send him financial overhaul legislation, saying the compromise lawmakers have crafted would be a boon to consumers and help deflect the next global financial crisis.
“We’re still digging ourselves out of an economic crisis that happened largely because there wasn’t strong enough oversight on Wall Street,” Obama said in his weekly radio and online address. “We can’t build a strong economy in America over the long run without ending this status quo, and laying a new foundation for growth and prosperity.”
He also pressed legislators to send him another proposal they omitted from the compromise financial package: a tax on big banks that supporters say would recoup some of the billionstaxpayers spent to bail out the ailing institutions.
House-Senate negotiators approved the overall deal Friday, and Democratic leaders hope to muscle it through Congress this week. The bill creates an independent agency tomonitor mortgages and other consumer financial products, restricts trading in complicated derivatives that helped ignite the financial meltdown and forces failing giant firms to liquidate, making it the widestreaching revamp of the nation’s financial rules since the Great Depression.
“We now stand on the verge of victory,” the president said.
Republicans say the measure ignores Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants who have received huge federal bailouts and whose bad loans helped trigger the housing and economic meltdowns.
Fannie Mae is the Federal National Mortgage Association; Freddie Mac is the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp.
In their weekly address, Republicans argued that Obama must focus on “creating more jobs, not more debt,” by embracing GOP efforts to cancel unspent Wall Street bailout funds and stimulus money and to help small businesses.
“Instead of growing government, we need to restart the engine of economic growth,” said Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis.
Front Section, Pages 8 on 06/27/2010