This marriage between government and the private sector is destroying America. There needs to be a bill that forbids this behavior.

Digby has a great post up detailing the debauchery.

Ryan Grim and Shahien Nasiripour at HuffPo have the whole sordid story:

Just as Congress enters the final stretch of the financial regulatory reform effort, one of the Treasury Department's leading liaisons to the Hill, Damon Munchus, is bailing out to go work for a financial services lobbying and consulting firm.

Munchus was one of Treasury's chief negotiators with the House Financial Services Committee.

[...]
Cypress is a five-year-old firm that specializes in telling banks and other investors what Treasury is up to and how they can best use that information to cash in. At the same time, a Cypress division is registered as a lobbyist on bank issues -- a kind of dual role that leaves it simultaneously telling clients how to exploit Treasury regulations and market-interventions, while lobbying for or against those regulations and interventions. It also does its own investing.

Munchus worked in the Office of Legislative Affairs, which deals directly with the Hill. His position as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Banking and Finance gave him intimate knowledge not just of the process but of key lawmakers -- what they privately support what they secretly need; what they detest; and what makes them tick.

That's invaluable information to investors. Munchus couldn't be reached for comment.

In case you still wonder why the government is always so flat-footted and outmaneuvered on important reform legislation, this should clue you in:

The ability of Wall Street to lure staffers into high-paying lobbying and consulting jobs has a corrosive effect on the legislative process, as staffers start doing the banks' bidding even before a payday, in the hopes of getting one someday. Moves like Munchus's only increase that incentive.

"You've got to wonder how much of a fight administration lobbyists are putting up against people they see as their future employers," Miller said.[...]

With the acquisition of Munchus, Cypress can now boast to employ high-level officials from four straight Treasury Secretaries.

There are a lot of factors that led to our dysfunctional system but this is the central one that touches all the others. The Village is a company town, and I don't mean the government, I mean Big Business and Wall Street. It's incestuous, corrupt and perhaps worst of all, completely inefficient and ineffectual, even for The Company. After all, Uncle Alan Greenspan eventually had to admit that these Mini Galts are incapable of even properly acting in their own self-interest by keeping American businesses competitive and the financial system working.

Instead they are operating like a tank full of piranhas rushing about furiously gobbling up everything in sight with no thought to whether or not there will be anything left tomorrow. That's fine for fish, but humans are supposed to be a little bit more evolved.

And this is only part of her post. It's not only Democrats that indulge in this behavior, It's whoever is in power. They are thick as thieves. And yet, health care for Americans has awakened the Village deficit hawks.

This is very, very interesting news. Is the White House serious, or is this a pro-consumer doggie biscuit to keep the left wing off their back? Here's hoping it's the real thing:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Obama administration waded into negotiations over Wall Street regulations Wednesday, calling for limits on the size of financial institutions and insisting that consumer protections remain a central objective of legislative attempts to rein in the industry.

In the Senate, talks continued on how to create a consumer protection entity. Republicans pressing for a watered-down consumer agency even as they voiced optimism that they could reach a deal with Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, within a week.

The Treasury Department circulated proposed legislation that would prevent commercial banks from carrying out high-risk trades and that would restrict the size of financial firms to holdings no greater than 10 percent of the entire financial industry's liabilities. That restriction would apply only to firms that grow through a merger or an acquisition.

Consumer protections and doing away with financial firms deemed too big to fail are two of the key elements of the legislative efforts to overhaul the rules that govern Wall Street and prevent a recurrence of the 2008 financial crisis. In reiterating its points, the administration was making certain its views were being heard in the Senate at a sensitive time in negotiations between Dodd and Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn.

Continue reading »

This whole thing is depressing as hell. Wall Street's Masters of the Universe devastate the entire world economy, and all the House of Lords (aka the Senate) can think about is not making the bankers mad at them. Imagine how bad it is that their attempts at reform are only making the problem worse. Krugman spells it all out:

So here’s the situation. We’ve been through the second-worst financial crisis in the history of the world, and we’ve barely begun to recover: 29 million Americans either can’t find jobs or can’t find full-time work. Yet all momentum for serious banking reform has been lost. The question now seems to be whether we’ll get a watered-down bill or no bill at all. And I hate to say this, but the second option is starting to look preferable.

[...] There’s no question that consumers need much better protection. The late Edward Gramlich — a Federal Reserve official who tried in vain to get Alan Greenspan to act against predatory lending — summarized the case perfectly back in 2007: “Why are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers? The question answers itself — the least sophisticated borrowers are probably duped into taking these products.”

Is it important that this protection be provided by an independent agency? It must be, or lobbyists wouldn’t be campaigning so hard to prevent that agency’s creation.

And it’s not hard to see why. Some have argued that the job of protecting consumers can and should be done either by the Fed or — as in one compromise that at this point seems unlikely — by a unit within the Treasury Department. But remember, not that long ago Mr. Greenspan was Fed chairman and John Snow was Treasury secretary. Case closed. The only way consumers will be protected under future antiregulation administrations — and believe me, given the power of the financial lobby, there will be such administrations — is if there’s an agency whose whole reason for being is to police bank abuses.

In summary, then, it’s time to draw a line in the sand. No reform, coupled with a campaign to name and shame the people responsible, is better than a cosmetic reform that just covers up failure to act.

The acid test for me will be: What does Elizabeth Warren think? It's probably a good idea because the story quotes a "senior administration" as expressing "concern" about reducing the Fed’s powers any further and said it was "really critical" that the Fed maintain direct supervision of the large financial firms.

Which could be Rahm, Summers or Geithner, and if they told me the sky was blue, I'd have to double check:

WASHINGTON — The Senate and the Obama administration are nearing agreement on forming a council of regulators, led by the Treasury secretary, to identify systemic risk to the nation’s financial system, officials said Wednesday.

The issue is one of the most fundamental in the contentious effort to overhaul regulation after the financial crisis, and addresses one of the primary lessons of the near debacle: that no one had been assigned to ensure the stability of the system as a whole and detect the kinds of excessive risk-taking and imbalances that could rock an entire economy.

Assigning the Treasury Department the job of spotting incipient trouble and addressing it quickly has support among senators from both parties, though several important provisions, including whether the council would have the ability to bypass existing banking regulators and impose its own rules on huge financial firms, remain to be worked out.

The effect would be to diminish the authority of the Federal Reserve, whose regulation of banks has been criticized for failing to head off the problems.

Talk about understatment. Considering that the boys at the Fed were in on the con game, you can see why Rahm, Larry and Timmy might be concerned about them losing control. Matt Taibbi:

Con artists have a word for the inability of their victims to accept that they've been scammed. They call it the "True Believer Syndrome." That's sort of where we are, in a state of nagging disbelief about the real problem on Wall Street. It isn't so much that we have inadequate rules or incompetent regulators, although both of these things are certainly true. The real problem is that it doesn't matter what regulations are in place if the people running the economy are rip-off artists. The system assumes a certain minimum level of ethical behavior and civic instinct over and above what is spelled out by the regulations. If those ethics are absent — well, this thing isn't going to work, no matter what we do. Sure, mugging old ladies is against the law, but it's also easy. To prevent it, we depend, for the most part, not on cops but on people making the conscious decision not to do it.

That's why the biggest gift the bankers got in the bailout was not fiscal but psychological. "The most valuable part of the bailout," says Rep. Sherman, "was the implicit guarantee that they're Too Big to Fail." Instead of liquidating and prosecuting the insolvent institutions that took us all down with them in a giant Ponzi scheme, we have showered them with money and guarantees and all sorts of other enabling gestures. And what should really freak everyone out is the fact that Wall Street immediately started skimming off its own rescue money. If the bailouts validated anew the crooked psychology of the bubble, the recent profit and bonus numbers show that the same psychology is back, thriving, and looking for new disasters to create. "It's evidence," says Rep. Kanjorski, "that they still don't get it."

More to the point, the fact that we haven't done much of anything to change the rules and behavior of Wall Street shows that we still don't get it. Instituting a bailout policy that stressed recapitalizing bad banks was like the addict coming back to the con man to get his lost money back. Ask yourself how well that ever works out. And then get ready for the reload.

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Dylan Ratigan and Elizabeth Warren discuss the Congressional Oversight Panel's findings that the implicit guarantee of future bailouts is keeping us from having any real reform of our financial systems in this country.

From The Hill--TARP oversight report: 'Implicit guarantee' of future bailouts hampering reform:

Unwinding the Treasury Department's $700-billion rescue program will be difficult, so long as there is an "implicit guarantee" that the federal government will continue to save failing banks, according to a new report.

The 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) has ultimately prompted banks to adjust "to the notion... [they] will be safe, no matter what," explained Elizabeth Warren, chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel that has been tracking those dollars."The whole market has adjusted to the notion that the big banks will be safe no matter what, and they can start planning their business approaches accordingly," Warren told CNBC on Thursday. "And thats dangerous."

"This business of regulatory reform that's going through Congress... is really where this is going to all come down," she added, as those reforms would allow the federal government to "credibly say to any large financial institution, 'If you screw this up badly enough, you really can be liquidated.'"

Without that legislation, "At the end of the day, when TARP is over, it's not really over," the chairwoman continued.

Warren's remarks on Thursday coincide with the Congressional Oversight Panel's latest look at the TARP's management and execution. The report, released this morning, stresses the legacy of the 2008 bailout program might be a lingering impression that the federal government will rescue failing firms that pose systemic risks to the nation's economy.

"This belief distorts prices, giving large financial institutions an advantage in raising capital that mid-sized and smaller banks – those not too big to fail – do not enjoy," Warren and her colleagues found. "These implicit guarantees also encourage major financial institutions to take unreasonable risks out of the belief that, no matter what happens, taxpayers will not allow their failure."

"So long as markets continue to believe that an implicit guarantee exists, moral hazard will continue to distort prices and endanger the nation’s economy, even after the last TARP program has been closed and the last TARP dollar has been repaid," the panel concluded.

Continue reading...

So we continue to prop up the housing market, probably because it provides the only positive economic news lately. Is this good for the long-term economy? I dunno, I guess it depends on how talented you are at pretending:

The Obama administration pledged Thursday to provide unlimited financial assistance to mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, an eleventh-hour move that allows the government to exceed the current $400 billion cap on emergency aid without seeking permission from a bailout-weary Congress.

The Christmas Eve announcement by the Treasury Department means that it can continue to run the companies, which were seized last year, as arms of the government for the rest of President Obama's current term.

But even as the administration was making this open-ended financial commitment, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac disclosed that they had received approval from their federal regulator to pay $42 million in Wall Street-style compensation packages to 12 top executives for 2009.

The compensation packages, including up to $6 million each to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's chief executives, come amid an ongoing public debate about lavish payments to executives at banks and other financial firms that have received taxpayer aid. But while many firms on Wall Street have repaid the assistance, there is no prospect that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will do so.

The administration faced a congressionally mandated deadline of Dec. 31 to increase the amount of aid it could provide to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which together have already received $111 billion in assistance.

Treasury said Thursday that its decision did not mean the firms would need $200 billion or more apiece, but that it instead was seeking to assure markets that the government would stand behind the companies. In a statement, Treasury said the move "should leave no uncertainty about the Treasury's commitment to support these firms as they continue to play a vital role in the housing market during this current crisis."

But hey, look over there! Ben Bernanke's the Man of the Year!

WASHINGTON — The value of loans held by the biggest beneficiaries of the government's bank bailout fell for the ninth consecutive month in October, the Treasury Department reported Tuesday, a day after President Barack Obama criticized top bankers for not doing enough to boost lending.

The department's monthly report, which monitors the top 22 recipients of support from the government's $700 billion rescue fund, showed that their average loan balances dropped in October by $36.8 billion, or 0.9 percent. That followed a decline of 1.1 percent, or $45.9 billion, in September.

Obama on Monday urged the nation's big banks to make "extraordinary" efforts to increase lending to help consumers and businesses who have been staggered by the worst recession since the 1930s.

Republicans have been flogging the notion that if we have health care reform, your premiums will go up. They have no data to back up the claim, but they repeat it endlessly. Here's a new report that throws cold water on their heads. Will this new report get the attention it deserves by the media?

Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provides the information for this MIT study:

A new analysis by a leading MIT economist provides new ammunition for Democrats as the Senate begins formally debating the historic health-reform bill being pushed by President Barack Obama.

The report concludes that under the Senate’s health-reform bill, Americans buying individual coverage will pay less than they do for today's typical individual market coverage, and would be protected from high out-of-pocket costs.

So Democrats will argue that under the Senate bill, Americans would pay less for more.

The new document arms Democrats with a response to the contention of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that the bill would mean “higher premiums, higher taxes, and massive cuts to Medicare.”

The “microsimulation” analysis is by Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Treasury Department official under President Bill Clinton. Gruber used data from the Congressional Budget Office.

Gruber concludes that people purchasing individual insurance would save an annual $200 (singles) to $500 (families) in 2009 dollars. And people with low incomes would receive premium tax credits that would reduce the price that they pay for health insurance by as much as $2,500 to $7,500.

The report will be circulated to Capitol Hill this week. Read the four-page report here.

As Digby says:

Now David Broder has talked to every "expert" at the Washington Post (well almost every expert) and got a different answer, so take all this with a grain of salt. Still, it's important to know what the "scientists" are saying. They often have undue influence on decision making.

Gruber should expect a fair amount of vicious attacks to be heaped on him as republican operatives will surely try to discredit him on every way possible. That's their standard MO.

Interesting. So Dodd's proposal would effectively remove Sheila Bair's role as one of the few senior administration officials advocating for consumers. (We already know bankers don't like her.) Still, it sounds like a few good ideas here, I'll wait to see how this shakes out.

Nov. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Senator Christopher Dodd will propose creating a single U.S. regulator that would strip the Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. of bank-supervision authority, said a person familiar with the matter.

Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, would eliminate the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision and fold the Treasury Department units into the new bank regulator, according to the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan isn’t public. The Connecticut Democrat is scheduled to release a draft of his financial-regulation overhaul plan today in Washington.

“It makes sense to have one regulator that deals with supervision,” Gilbert Schwartz, a former Fed attorney and a partner at Washington law firm Schwartz & Ballen LLP, said in an interview. “You’ll see a real battle by the Fed and the FDIC to retain their supervisory authority.”

Dodd has faulted the U.S. bank regulation system, saying it encourages charter shopping and a “race to the bottom” by agencies to win oversight roles. His proposal goes further than proposals by President Barack Obama and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank to merge the OTS and OCC.

[...] Dodd will also propose creating a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, a council of regulators to monitor large firms for disruptive effects on the industry and the economy, and giving the FDIC power to unwind failed firms whose collapse in bankruptcy could shake the economy, the person said.

I just don't know what the best options are here, but I'm not feeling reassured that the people advising Geithner were making so much money from the people they're supposed to be regulating:

Oct. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Some of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s closest aides, none of whom faced Senate confirmation, earned millions of dollars a year working for Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc. and other Wall Street firms, according to financial disclosure forms.

The advisers include Gene Sperling, who last year took in $887,727 from Goldman Sachs and $158,000 for speeches mostly to financial companies, including the firm run by accused Ponzi scheme mastermind R. Allen Stanford. Another top aide, Lee Sachs, reported more than $3 million in salary and partnership income from Mariner Investment Group, a New York hedge fund.

As part of Geithner’s kitchen cabinet, Sperling and Sachs wield influence behind the scenes at the Treasury Department, where they help oversee the $700 billion banking rescue and craft executive pay rules and the revamp of financial regulations. Yet they haven’t faced the public scrutiny given to Senate-confirmed appointees, nor are they compelled to testify in Congress to defend or explain the Treasury’s policies.

“These people are incredibly smart, they’re incredibly talented and they bring knowledge,” said Bill Brown, a visiting professor at Duke University School of Law and former managing director at Morgan Stanley. “The risk is they will further exacerbate the problem of our regulators identifying with Wall Street.”

Gee, ya think?

[...] Treasury spokesman Andrew Williams said the department needs people with a deep understanding of markets and the financial system, especially as it works to fend off the worst recession in half a century.

“The secretary thought that the best way to utilize their talents was to allow these individuals to provide advice to the secretary on policy issues through appointments as counselor,” Williams said.

All of Geithner’s counselors are subject to federal ethics rules, including a pledge to avoid contact with their former firms for at least a year, Williams added.

Most officials at the Treasury who have been approved by Congress come from academic, legal or non-Wall Street backgrounds.

Midwest Voices: Bob Dole outs naysayer Mitch McConnell

TalkLeft: Sully: It's Hillary's Fault

Blue Gal: Halliburton Rape

evilslutopia: Getting to the point of #nestlefamily

Wall St. Cheat Sheet: The Treasury Department endorses lying to the public

William K. Wolfrum Chronicles: I'm heterosexual - and wow, do I have a lot of rights

Oops, just kidding! Just think, if they'd actually admitted the banks were in deep trouble, and that their assets weren't worth a dime, the crisis might have bottomed out a lot sooner - and the banks wouldn't have been able to use TARP funds to buy up their competitors!

Senior U.S. officials deliberately misled the American people about the health of banks receiving huge government cash infusions last year, according to a report released today from the Treasury Department TARP watchdog.

The officials believed they were telling noble lies. The idea was that confidence needed to be restored and panic stemmed, even if this meant misleading the public about the actual health of our financial institutions.

Of course, this backfired. The government and the bailout lost public credibility when the financial crisis deepened, according to TARP watchdog Neil Barofsky's report.

Worse, the lies may have made the crisis worse by creating false expectations that the bailed out banks would be able to increase lending. Businesses and individuals planning to borrow would have discovered that their projects were impossible and their savings inadequate as banking lending continued to fall.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that the $125 billion injection into nine banks in October 2008 was a program for "healthy" institutions. But privately senior officials believed several of those firms were less than healthy. Hank Paulson himself believed one of those institutions might fail.

"By stating that healthy' institutions would be able to increase overall lending, Treasury may have created unrealistic expectations about the institutions' condition and their ability to increase lending," the report said.

It's not as though I didn't already think this, but hearing someone like Joseph Stiglitz say it out loud is pretty chilling. And he's not the only one, either:

Sept. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize- winning economist, said the U.S. has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

“In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”

Stiglitz’s views echo those of former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who has advised President Barack Obama’s administration to curtail the size of banks, and Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer, who suggested last month that governments may want to discourage financial institutions from growing “excessively.”

A year after the demise of Lehman forced the Treasury Department to spend billions to shore up the financial system, Bank of America Corp.’s assets have grown and Citigroup Inc. remains intact. In the U.K., Lloyds Banking Group Plc, 43 percent owned by the government, has taken over the activities of HBOS Plc, and in France BNP Paribas SA now owns the Belgian and Luxembourg banking assets of insurer Fortis.

While Obama wants to name some banks as “systemically important” and subject them to stricter oversight, his plan wouldn’t force them to shrink or simplify their structure.

Stiglitz said the U.S. government is wary of challenging the financial industry because it is politically difficult, and that he hopes the Group of 20 leaders will cajole the U.S. into tougher action.

Okay, let's see if I'm following this. The administration is talking about lending money to small businesses because the banks to which they've already funneled billions didn't do the thing all that money was supposed to do: make them open up the taps and lend working capital to businesses.

Are we clear now?

The Obama administration is developing an initiative to take money from the $700 billion program for the banking system and make it available to millions of small businesses, which officials say are essential to any economic recovery because they employ so many people, according to sources familiar with the plan.

The new effort -- which would represent a striking shift from the rescue program's original mandate -- would direct billions of bailout dollars toward a program that aims more at saving jobs than righting the financial system.

A proposal being floated by senior Treasury Department officials calls for using the bailout funds to expand an existing government program that helps small companies borrow money from banks a low rates to keep their businesses going, the source said. These "working capital" loans would come with few restrictions and could be used for buying inventory, holding onto employees and paying off short-term debt.

The initiative would expand a Small Business Administration lending program called 7(a), the agency's most popular lending program. Lines of credit for small companies could greatly increase in size. If the firm failed despite receiving this help, the government would cover most of the losses on the federal loan, perhaps as much as 90 percent. Lines of credit act like the credit cards for companies -- short-term revolving debt used to pay a variety of immediate expenses.

Discussions about the plan have reached the highest levels of the administration. In a meeting at the White House last week, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner expressed support of his staff's proposal, while National Economic Council director Lawrence Summers was more skeptical. Neither has made up his mind, officials said.

"Larry has supported every small business idea we have implemented so far," said Gene Sperling, a counselor to Geithner, who has been working on small business issues. "When we have a brainstorming session on new ideas, Larry as always asks the toughest questions in the room."

The debate over the proposal has centered on whether taxpayers would be protected and whether banks that make these loans would lower their standards if the government promises to cover most of any loan losses, according to participants present or briefed on the discussions. The spoke on condition of anonymity because the conversations were considered private.

On one hand, administration officials want to prevent healthy small businesses from closing their doors and adding their workers to the growing ranks of the unemployed. But small companies have poorer record of repaying loans compared to large corporations and would be the riskiest investment made under the bailout program to date.

The officials said the discussions are in the early stages and that no plan is expected before the fall. Ideas currently on the table may evolve or be scrapped altogether, they said.

Anything that creates or maintains jobs is good, but I wonder if this will really do that. I think too many of those small businesses are already gone.

The New Yorker has a great profile of Sheila Bair, the populist Republican who's at the helm of the FDIC. (h/t Riverdaughter)

As you may already know, Bair is not well liked by the Wall St. crowd that's running the White House show. (Apparently she has this bizarre idea that her job is to look out for working folk. Crazy talk!) Well, she's very popular with regular people - the administration wouldn't get rid of her, it would make a stink. Instead, they've just neutered her:

These debates entered into the Administration’s discussions about building a new regulatory architecture. In late March, Geithner previewed for Congress some of the key concepts that Treasury wanted. The outline seemed to match the Bair camp’s ideas. [Ladies, has this ever happened to you?] A new authority with the power to take over large financial institutions that posed a systemic risk to the economy was modeled on the F.D.I.C., which, Geithner suggested in his testimony, would be an equal partner with Treasury in resolving such firms if they failed. He seemed to be saying that although he and Bair may have disagreed about how to handle the current crisis, there was much more consensus about how to deal with a future one.

But in the white paper detailing the new legislation, which the Administration released on June 17th, all the new authority to regulate firms that posed systemic risk was vested in the Federal Reserve. During Geithner’s testimony before the Senate, Jim Bunning, of Kentucky, echoing Bair, was incredulous. “It took fourteen years for the Fed to write one regulation on mortgages after we gave it the power to do that,” he said. “What makes you think that the Fed will do better this time around?” In addition, while the March plan said that the “Secretary and the FDIC would decide” how to resolve a failing firm, the new plan said such power should “be vested in Treasury.” Geithner could appoint the F.D.I.C. to do the technical work of cleaning up the firm, but between late March and mid-June — when Bair’s aggressive ideas about how to handle Citigroup leaked to the press — Bair’s agency had been downgraded from Treasury’s equal partner to a sidekick.

The senior Treasury official said that stripping authority from the F.D.I.C. had nothing to do with pressure from the banks. “Making a group decision on something that must be done really quickly is not easy,” he said. “At the end of the day, someone has to have the ability to make a call, and it’s better to have that authority vested in one person.”

When I asked Bair about the plan, she said, “I think it reflected a lot of input from a lot of different agencies, and the private sector, and insurance and consumer groups. It’s a very difficult task to try to balance all the different perspectives and come up with a package, and every compromise is going to have people who are unhappy about various parts of it. So I think it’s a starting point.” I said that she sounded disappointed. “I don’t know if ‘disappointed’ is the right word,” she replied.