Thursday, January 08, 2009

Obama's CNBC Interview on Economy, Football, Abs, BlackBerrys, Panetta, Regulation


Obama seems to be interested in doing a lot of combining.
He's also considering a collaboration between the Department of Defense and NASA as far as making rockets.
Here's something that's being mulled for the financial industry:
Politico: One of the leading ideas would combine the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission into a super-regulator that would be like another Federal Reserve as a cornerstone of the U.S. financial system.

This plan, still in draft forms, is likely to include tough new rules for stock trading, banks and the broader financial sector — as well as greater transparency for how government money is spent cleaning up the entire system, according to Democrats familiar with the plans.

Obama told CNBC’s John Harwood on Wednesday that he plans “a substantial overhaul” with “better enforcement, better oversight, better disclosure, increased transparency.”

“Wall Street has not worked, our regulatory system has not worked the way it's supposed to,” Obama said. “We're going to have to look at this alphabet soup of agencies and figure out how do we get them to work together more effectively. We've got to stop splintering functions in such a way that capital in one form is treated one way and capital in another form is treated another way, because these days in global financial markets, they're all fungible.”
Here's the full CNBC transcript, where Obama talks extensively about lunching with the presidents yesterday, the economy, Blackberrys, those Hawaii ab shots, Leon Panetta, college football playoffs, the Geneva Convention and regulation:

I've replaced the transcript excerpts with the videos below.
Read the transcript. It's a must read.
Or just watch: