When bankers heard over the weekend that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney had selected Paul Ryan as his running mate, most likely cheered the news. The Wisconsin congressman is, after all, the Capitol Hill antithesis of Barney Frank. He's the Republicans' standard-bearer for limited government in all its forms and has gone into greater depth than anyone else in his party in laying out a plan for limiting it.
Given the mountain of regulations that bankers are struggling to digest under Dodd-Frank (which Ryan voted against), that message is undoubtedly music to the ears of many financiers. It also explains why Ryan has had strong financial backing from banking and insurance lobbyists as a Wisconsin congressman and head of the House Budget Committee.
Yet for bankers there's a lot about Ryan's selection to dislike. On the fringe, for those who believe healthy banks have suffered for the sins of their irresponsible, bailed-out brethren, there's Ryan's grudging support for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. In explaining his backing for Tarp, even as two-thirds of his Republican colleagues initially rejected it, Ryan argued that if the financial system had been permitted to collapse in 2008, "we would have had a big-government agenda sweeping through this country so fast that we wouldn't have recovered from it."
The Jamie Dimons of the world will be no more thrilled by Ryan's support for a Volcker Rule that effectively resurrects Glass-Steagall. "If you're a bank and you want to operate like some nonbank entity like a hedge fund, then don't be a bank. Don't let banks use their customers' money to do anything other than traditional banking," Ryan said last year.
More important, on the big-picture stuff, Ryan's supporters and detractors agree on one thing: His presence on the GOP ticket is going to further polarize the country, assuming that's possible.
That means in the run-up to the November balloting the story line is clearer than ever. Obama-Biden will portray themselves as the champions of working families and will position their rivals as conniving to give the rich more tax breaks while depriving the rest of us of Medicare and Social Security. What Ryan adds to the ticket, in the words of Obama campaign aide David Axelrod, is a "right-wing idealogue."
The Romney-Ryan campaign, by contrast, will try to cut a profile of favoring American enterprise, small government and deficit cuts while painting its Obama-Biden antagonists as having failed to revive the economy and pandering to big labor.
It's just one pundit's opinion (mine), but Romney's bid to shake up the presidential race by selecting a young, polarizing firebrand doesn't seem to bode well for the GOP or its financial industry backers. Adding an ideologically extreme running mate to energize the base certainly didn't work out too well for John McCain when he hitched up with Sarah Palin four years ago.
Instead of a sign of strength, Romney's selection of Ryan appears to be a recognition by the former turnaround artist that his own campaign is lagging in the polls and itself needs a turn-around, as The New York Times' Nate Silver points out.
Jon Bruss
Fortress Partners Capital Management, Ltd.
The next time you write an opinion piece, you might consider adding some opinions of your own, rather than regurgitating what you heard on the Rachel Maddow show last night.
I love my industry and want it to survive and thrive with limited interference from a government that has neither the ability nor the inclination to regulate it in a fair and common-sense manner. However, I love my country even more, as I suspect is also the case with most of your subscribers. Is Paul Ryan a polar opposite to Barack Obama and Joe Biden? Absolutely. This is an election in which people are going to have to CHOOSE what kind of future we want for this country. Big government or more freedom, as was the dream of our forefathers? It seems clear that "American Banker" has endorsed the former.
1) We are not pro-big government, pro-Obama or pro-CFPB. We are not anti-big government, pro-Romney or anti-CFPB. We write articles analyzing situations, and post commentary from staff and others expressing opinions. But as a paper, we do not endorse any opinion.
2) For the record, I don't think Neil here is expressing an anti-Romney view. What he's trying to say is that he thinks the Ryan pick doesn't help Romney politically, and may show signs of desperation on Romney's part. Others, I'm sure, disagree, but let's not turn this into something it isn't. He isn't saying he dislikes Romney or supports Obama. He's just analyzing the political landscape.
3) Please remember this: American Banker is not a pro-bank publication. It's not an anti-bank publication either. Bankers are our readers, and we value your input. But we are, at all times, trying to tell you what you SHOULD hear, not necessarily what you WANT to hear. This is an important distinction. If you want an echo chamber for your political or worldview, look somewhere else. If you want a discussion about the hot topics and challenges facing banking -- given without prejudice to any side -- you won't find a better place than American Banker.
Rob Blackwell
Washington Bureau Chief
American Banker
Ryan would probably make a good banker and he appears to be a wise choice as VP.
While I agree with you that if bankers really understood what Ryan has been saying they would not be quite so enthusiastic, I would suggest that Ryan will soon have to change his views or at least fudge them quite substantially. This is because the bankers who are funding Romney and Ryan are far smarter than these commentators and they will not like one bit the formula Ryan has hitherto supported.
Someone stated above, Ryan might have answers that the country needs, but not what the country will want to hear. Substitute "contributors" for "country" and you get closer to the truth. There is no way the publicly subsidized behemoth banks will want to hear his message and the last thing they would want is to have free market principles apply to them. It is the reason that Romney has remained remarkably quiet on the banks, even though he could have gone after Geithner and the Treasury Department. Follow the money.
Forget all the distractions -- As Mr. Clinton onces said "IT IS ABOUT THE ECONOMY STUPID!"
By the way,My preteen granddaughter knows more about budgeting than the current administration.
It seems as if some of the "readers" here don't actually read. When I was in banking, every time the American Banker ran a story the bankers did not like, they huffed and puffed about canceling their subscriptions. No wonder some many of them get blindsided by new events!
The only thing I can say is that Mr. Weinberg is living on a different ideological planet than the industry he serves in his role at AB - what a shame! His comments fall into the category of the AB editorial earlier this year saying that Elizabeth Warren was a moderate and that we should just stop picking on her and being obstructionist to good regulation.
Yeah right!
Sincerely
R. Martin
If you don't believe that our politicians have made huge fiscal promises they cannot deliver, please read this:
According to an analysis by economists hired for USA Today: the federal government has accumulated "$61.6 trillion in unfunded obligations.". Now add in the actual national debt of over $15 trillion and compare that to the wealth of the country. According to the Federal Reserve Bank's economic analysis unit the entire net worth of every man, woman and child, corporation, non-profit and unit of government other than our federal government is $55 trillion. Our national debt and the future cost of the entitlement programs is over $75 trillion, far exceeding the net worth of the country, exceeding even the total assets of the country!
We could tax *every* dollar of wealth away and it wouldn't be enough to close the gap. We've done a leveraged buy-out of the United States and screwed our children.
See: http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2011-06-06-us-owes-62-trillion-in-debt_n.htm
I think your readers have a keener eye for good analysis than you do. Mr. Weinberg's article is baffling and he uses poor logic to draw his conclusion. He starts the article by pointing out Mr. Ryan's backing of TARP and the Volcker Rule, both received stronger backing from Pres. Obama and his party than the GOP. Mr. Weinberg then criticizes Ryan as being polarizing and a "right-wing ideologue". How does someone go from having the same views as the democrats to a right-wing extremist in two paragraphs?
Countering his own previous statements. He probably needs someone with an objective and logical slant in the other direction to iron out some seeming indecision in his very intelligently created Post.
Get a clue when liberal magazines post this most thorough beating of the president that I've ever seen! perhaps you want to re-access you projections!
Yes he, along with Judy Biggert, (my misguided Republican Congressional Representative from the western suburbs of Chicago), both mistakenly supported TARP and they were wrong to do that, truth be told. Any sensible politician must now admit that TARP only perpetuated our TBTF/TBTM failed, moral hazard banking model as evidenced by the rapid growth of our toxic trillion dollar banks who refuse to materially lend more than 1% of their balance sheets to our critically important, job creating small businesses.
However, to say Ryan is "a polarizing firebrand" or "ideologically extreme" is simply not accurate. Irrespective of the fact that liberals use that kind of inflammatory language to fan the flames of political divisiveness, it fails to describe Ryan's true ideology.
Ryan, like Judy Biggert, got duped into TARP by corrupt big bank lobbyists, Wall Street mavens and our former Treasury Secretary who initially mis-interpreted our banking problem as a liquidity crisis and was later forced into re-characterizing it in the form of an ineffective, TARP capital solvency fix.
Yes, Ryan and Biggert were both wrong for supporting TARP, as I vehemently argued in Biggert's Westmont office to no avail with her Chief of Staff. Just because they got in line with the democrats to bail out the big banks does not make them right wingers. If anything, they voted more like democratic bureaucrats then "polarizing" or "ideological" right wingers.
What needs more light is Ryan's detailed, articulate style and focus on supporting job's producing, small business. Trickle down economics only works in this economy if tax cuts and less regulation makes it into the hands of job creators, not jobs exporting multinational corporations or TBTF/TBTM banks refusing to materially lend to small business.
Coming from the land of cheese could only help the Romney/Ryan team relate more to middle america and small business. Romney would be wise to promote Ryan's connection to mid-west values. Ryan's constituents in Wisconsin have seen first hand what bloated government bureaucracies have done to destroy healthy job growth.
The reference to Palin pales in comparison to Ryan's articulate and concise style. There simply is no relevant comparison between these two politicians. Ryan's vision will connect more with middle class voters once they stop and actually listen to what he has been saying about how we can create jobs.
Yes, even my liberal democratic cheesehead neighbors will listen and possibly vote for Romney as long as Romney stays the course in the direction of Ryan values. After all, its all about jobs and Ryan has articulated more meaningful plans to support jobs producing small business than any polarizing and pretentious failed jobs plan that has come out of the liberal Whitehouse for four very long and painful years.
Give Ryan a listen, what do we have to lose...other than the opportunity to create more jobs?
Dale R. Kluga
President
Cobra Capital LLC
Darien, Illinois 60561
www.cobrallc.com
Solutions that work(R)