Investors.com calls the prospect of the Dodd bill becoming law nothing short of fascism:
As it stands, Dodd's bill amounts to a nationalization of our financial sector. It creates permanent bailouts in the U.S. for any company that regulators consider to be in danger of default. That includes any company "substantially engaged in activities ... that are financial in nature."
In other words, virtually any big company, since many industrial giants — GM and GE leap to mind — have their own finance units.
This would give sweeping discretionary control over the economy to the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Treasury — the very regulators who, asleep at the switch in 2005 and 2006, let the U.S. economic locomotive run off the rails.
If the Dodd bill passes intact, regulators can essentially shut down any company at will and force it into receivership. This style of state-directed capitalism has been tried before — in Italy under Mussolini and, later, in Argentina under Peron. It didn't work then, it won't work now.
