But the U.S. is not being sold out in a vacuum.<\/span><\/p>\nOn March 1, 1999, countries accounting for more than 90 per cent of the global financial services market signed onto the World Trade Organization\u2019s Financial Services Agreement (FSA). By signing the FSA, they committed to deregulate their financial markets.<\/span><\/p>\nFor example, by signing the FSA, the U.S. agreed not to break up too big to fails. The U.S. also promised to repeal Glass-Steagall, and did so 8 months after signing the FSA.<\/span><\/p>\nIndeed, in signing the FSA and other WTO agreements, the U.S. has legally bound itself as follows:<\/span><\/p>\n\n- No new regulation: The United States agreed to a \u201cstandstill provision\u201d that requires that we not create new regulations (or reverse liberalization) for the list of financial services bound to comply with WTO rules. Given that the United States has made broad WTO financial services commitments \u2013 and thus is forbidden by this provision from imposing new regulations in these many areas \u2013 this provision seriously limits the policy [options] available to address the current crisis.<\/li>\n
- Removal of regulation: The United States even agreed to try to even eliminate domestic financial service regulatory policies that meet GATS [i.e. General Agreement on Trade in Services] rules, but that may still \u201cadversely affect the ability of financial service suppliers of any other (WTO) Member to operate, compete, or enter\u201d the market.<\/li>\n
- No bans on new financial service \u201cproducts\u201d: The United States is also bound to ensure that foreign financial service suppliers are permitted \u201cto offer in its territory any new financial service,\u201d a direct conflict with the various proposals to limit various risky investment instruments, such as certain types of derivatives.<\/li>\n
- Certain forms of regulation banned outright: The United States agreed that it would not set limits on the size, corporate form or other characteristics of foreign firms in the broad array of financial services it signed up to WTO strictures \u2026<\/li>\n
- Treating foreign and domestic firms alike is not sufficient: The GATS market-access limits on U.S. domestic regulation apply in absolute terms; that is to say, even if a policy applies to domestic and foreign firms alike, if it goes beyond what WTO rules permit, it is forbidden. And, forms of regulation not outright banned by the market-access requirements must not inadvertently \u201cmodify the conditions of competition in favor of services or service suppliers\u201d of the United States, even if they apply identically to foreign and domestic firms.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
In other words, the problem isn\u2019t just that Congress and the White House have sold out to the Wall Street giants.<\/span><\/p>\nThe problem is also that the U.S. has signed WTO agreements that have given the keys to the too big to fails, and have neutered their regulators. Even if some politicians tried to stand up to Wall Street \u2013 or even if we \u201cthrow out all of the bums\u201d currently in political roles \u2013 the U.S. would still be locked into the WTO\u2019s scheme for helping the financial giants to grow ever bigger and to take ever-bigger and ever-riskier gambles.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nYet another reason to oppose the so-called “Doha” round, which promises to deregulate financial services even further.<\/p>\n
What has gone on at the WTO is that it has been functioned as a prostitute for elements in our economy which do not produce tangible goods, finance, insurance, entertainment, patent holders, etc. at the expense of absolutely everything else in the economy.<\/p>\n
It’s killing us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There are a lot of people out there who think that free trade will always do all kinds of good things: It creates peace, it creates democracy, it keeps your daughter from dating the guy with the tattoos and piercings. I’m not one of these people. First, I think that we have yet to see …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1004,964,1016,985],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-finance","category-foreign-relations","category-international-commerce","category-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189836"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189836\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}