Is it just me or was that ad unintentionally hilarious? So we’re supposed to vote against Toomey because he worked on Wall Street? Is Wall Street the new KKK or Communist Party, such that any affiliation with Wall Street automatically disqualifies you? (I wonder where we’ll find anyone who knows anything about finance and/or the economy after we ban everyone with a Wall Street connection from higher office.) Oh, and the D’s do realize that they receive FAR MORE contributions from Wall Street than R’s, right? Why is it OKAY to take Wall Street’s cash even as it’s terrible to have worked there?

On the substance, anyone who actually understands FinReg knows that it’s a handout to Wall Street that enshrines Too Big Too Fail and lets them help themselves to taxpayers’ money whenever they want to. (Sure, D’s say its anti-Wall Street, but it isn’t; it’s really a permanent TARP on steroids.) The Jobs Bill – how’s that working out? Remember the D’s promised that unemployment would never ever rise above 8% if we passed it. Yet, we passed it & we’re at 9.9%. And health care? They really want to run on Obamacare? I think the RNC should buy time to run this ad throughout PA because if this race is decided on health care, Toomey should start measuring drapes for his new digs.

Frankly, the fact that D’s want to use Wall Street’s money to finance ads that attack Toomey for having worked on Wall Street is further proof (as if any were needed) that irony is dead.

Well put Chris. I kept wait for the meat; the accusation that he singlehandedly cause the mortgage crisis. But it didn’t come. I’m at a loss to see how working on Wall Street or believing that government regulation only corrupts the problem are by thmeselves horrible things. How silly. Makes you wonder if this is all they got…

Well let’s get specific then. Pat Toomey traded swaps and derivatives on Wall Street -and then went to Washington to represent the interests of the derivatives industry.

Once in DC, Toomey wrote the legislation that repealed Glass-Steagall . He was and is an adamant opponent of any regulation of Wall Street recklessness because he made his fortune there. He was a champion of the policies that gave us enormous, unaccountable banks gambling with the derivatives that brought down our economy.

Pat Toomey didn’t vote for the bailout, but he helped cause it. He championed deregulation that led directly to the financial crisis. And if we send him back to Congress, he’ll do it again.

Making money is not a crime. The govt. interfering with the free market should be a crime. Healthcare is actually favored by the big corporations. This is just dishonest and misleading.

Oh, so he traded swaps & derivatives! And here I thought the Ds didn’t have a substantive complaints. I hope you’ll support my Mandatory Death Penalty for Derivatives Traders Act because I think that’s the ONLY way to deal with THOSE people. While we’re at it, we should round up his children & shoot them too because they might want to trade derivatives too – that sort of thing runs in families. Really, are you for real? We should oppose somebody because he traded derivatives?

You’re against people who repealed Glass Steagall? So am I. People like Cong. Paul Kanjorski, Pres. Bill Clinton and all the other Ds who voted for it (or signed it).

If the Ds are “anti-Wall Street,” why do they get so much money from Wall Street? You think bankers are too stupid to know that Ds are “anti-Wall Street” like you claim? You think they’re so altruistic that they support an “anti-Wall Street” party?

Like they say in the movies, “follow the money.” The Democratic Party is the political-arm of Wall Street; when a D’s in office, he collects campaign contributions; when he’s out, he collects speaking fees & lucrative sinecures & discount mortgages (ie. Bill Clinton, Rahm Emmanuel, Chris Dodd), and all he has to do in exchange is pretend to be “anti-Wall Street.”

Ds are anti-Wall Street like Casablanca’s Capt. Renault was anti-gambling.

Chris, it’s not just that he’s a swaps & derivatives guy. It’s that he went to Congress to advocate against regulating swaps and derivatives because he was a creature of Wall Street. It’s not that hard to understand.

And if Democrats are no better than Republicans on Wall Street reform, why has Wall Street hired a virtual army to lobby against new reforms? The banks hate the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (a Democratic proposal), they hate the Volcker Rule (contained in the Merkley-Levin amendment), they hate the proposals to spin off derivatives desks, ban naked credit default swaps, end Too Big to Fail and reinstate Glass-Steagall (Lincoln,Dorgan,Brown and Cantwell respectively-all Democrats).

Is it true that some Dems are too beholden to Wall Street? Yes. But so are nearly all Republicans. To pretend that the parties are identical on this issue is just as ignorant as pretending that they are monolithic. If we look at the candidates, it’s undeniable that Sestak favors Wall Street reform, and Toomey would be a champion of Wall Street deregulation.

Interesting. So Toomey is a major player in the events leading up to the Fall 2008 collapse of Wall Street and the near-failure of our financial system?

Sounds like a sweet resume to launch a campaign with.

Weak and disingenuous. The reality is that it was Joe Sestak and the Ds who voted in favor of the Wall Street bailouts – Pat was opposed. So it was the Ds who protected the special interests by bailing Wall Street with Main Street’s money.

Good points raised by the others about the phoney disqualifier of having worked on Wall Street and the double standards of the Ds attacking Wall Street but then taking their money.

Joe Murphy – that statement is absolutely idiotic and shows that you’re more of an anarchist than a libertarian.

Even a libertarian utopia still has government regulation of markets. You have to have regulation to ensure perfect information otherwise you get market failures all over the place. But, by all means, don’t let me stop you with facts, economics, and logic.

Dear Democrats and Sestak campaign,

Please continue to look foolish by trying to confuse the public and conflate financial terms. I understand that fearmongering is part and parcel of your campaign strategy, so please keeping pushing your luck with spurious logic. It only makes you look like part of the problem. If you are so easily confused by financial terms, how could we possibly trust you to fix the problems let alone regulate the abuses.

Good luck and best wishes,
ChescoTom

If you think FinReg will hurt Wall Street, then you’d better just send your money to Goldman Sachs now and save them the hassle of stealing it from you over time. Big firms love regulation because they can afford compliance costs, while their smaller competitors cannot. And who doesn’t love less competition? Big firms love FinReg’s “opt-out” of bankruptcy provisions because it lowers their cost of capital. That is, they get their raw material (borrowed money) for less than their competitors. Big firms don’t care about consumer lending rules – they don’t run pay day lenders, auto dealers & all the other small retail-focused lending operations that’ll be targeted by the new consumer cops. Do you really think that the new consumer cops will go after the big boys, or do you think that they – like the SEC – will focus on the smaller, headline-grabbing cases that (while worthy) don’t implicate the big boys? The auto dealer who forgot to file Form 32J in triplicate will pay fines while Goldman goes on its merry way. (Goldman’s got an army of lawyers to make sure it files its paperwork, so – even if the cops wanted to get them – Goldman is a much tougher target. Besides, Goldman can fight back while your local auto dealer has to pay-up guilty or not, so the cops know they can rack up more “successes” against little guys, which is yet another reason they focus on the little guys.)

Folks, don’t be saps & victims. Exercise a little common sense. Do you really think Goldman Sachs gave $1MM to Obama because they thought he’d make a dandy President? They were paying for services rendered (support of TARP) and services yet to be provided (TARP on steroids). Don’t get me wrong: if you like TARP & TARP II, then you shouldn’t care that GS paid Obama to support those programs, but don’t pretend that Obama’s ever going to cross GS. That’s just not realistic.

The reality is that all the TALK about doing something is just a quick and easy way to shakedown Wall Street. I mean Obama literally announces his “anti” Wall Street programs while he’s on fundraising trips to Wall Street! They couldn’t make this legalized extortion any more obvious if they tried. Once the Ds have all the protection money they think they can get, they’ll water-down the bill, so it’ll only affect small business and others who can’t afford to buy their services.

Nobody thinks markets are perfect or self-regulating; markets, after all, are the product of legal rules. That said, no sane person believes that we should change the rules just because we don’t like the result. Sure, some bad things will happen to good people if we don’t bailout Wall Street and “protect” consumers and so on, but you know what? Bad things happen to good people when we do all of those things, and the irony is that history proves more bad things happen to more good people when we try to “fix” the market. You may not remember it, but the Soviet Union killed tens of millions of people trying to achieve a “fair” distribution of resources. And Obamanomics has pushed millions into unemployment and our nation to the brink of bankruptcy, but – hey – at least government workers will get pay raises and guaranteed pensions this year! The fact that these “fair” policies never work doesn’t seem to diminish their appeal to some people, but the reality is that Big Government = poverty, oppression, and corruption. What we need is a Small Government reform. Break-up the big banks. End campaign finance “reform,” so we can have a political marketplace of ideas. Take away the Fed’s discretion, so they can’t manipulate the economy to favor their pals.

Look, you liberals want to pretend that we’re on the side of banks and you’re on the side of people, but the reality is that we’re on the side of what works and you’re on the side of Utopian nonsense that’ll just hand everything over to those ruthless enough to exploit your naivete (like the banks).

I’m sick and tired of Ds like Barney “Freddie & Fannie are fine” Frank and Paul “What Crisis” Kanjorski telling us that if only we gave them still more power, they’d finally do what they never managed to do before. Do realize those idiots lost $400B on Freddie & Fannie & we’re not done losing money yet? What kind of person would keep their job after a $400 BILLION dollar mistake? Does Hallmark have a card for that? (“I know I lost you $400 Billion, but some friendships are worth more than money!”) Look, I don’t think any of you Ds are bad guys, but I think you’re clueless. FinReg is the Briar Patch, and Wall Street is the rabbit, but you keep telling yourself they REALLY don’t want to go there.

If the Ds get their way, Wall Street will be in its Laughing Place
soon enough.

Chris, that is a lot of words. Try holding down a voter for thirty minutes while he is on his way to the voting booth and explaining that to him.

Try to remember Wall Street didn’t need a bailout because of years of being over regulated, its like an infant; you can’t leave it in a room by itself. But seriously you have convinced me; because while Admiral Joe Sestak was only out defending our country Pat Toomey was bundling Mortgages into leveraged options packages for America!

Looks like we lose either way in Pennsylvania, I don’t know who to vote for!

I guess I’m a little late to this posting, but Toomey seems to be somewhat of an anachronism in 2010.

Crudely labeled, strict “supply side” economics has either failed or produced drastic inflation almost everywhere it’s been applied – in this country in the 1920s and 1980s, by the IMF in Asia, and by the World Bank via the “Washington Consensus” in the 1990s. It goes beyond the normal mechanics of the business cycle, as the troughs (or recessions) in supply-side systems are always deeper and prolonged, because they usually involve a deadly combination of inflation and unemployment.

Here, our recent recession was primarily the result of poor financial regulation and lending practices — essentially, our rules weren’t comprehensive or good enough.

While I appreciate Toomey’s intellectual honesty, his views seem out of touch with the reality of the last decade.

The derivatives and swaps that Toomey traded were derived from what? The answer is they were derived from mortgages which were “troubled.” It’s crucial to understand that the problem wasn’t the derivatives, those who designed them, or those who sold and traded them. The problem was the underlying mortgage rot upon which they were predicated. And this leads directly to Joe Sestak, who as a member of congress supported the imposition of a standard for underwriting mortgages that was based on “good social purpose” criteria rather than on conventional, common sense mortgage underwriting.

The argument that Toomey “traded swaps and derivatives”, and therefore he is an unworthy candidate for the Senate of the United States abuses common sense; but, it does so no more than does the argument that because someone meets “good social purpose criteria” they must be given a mortgage.

The point is Joe Sestak not only supported, but promulgated the abuse of common sense while a member of congress, and then did nothing to rein it in after it hit the fan. Now his supporters want to smear Pat Toomey with innuendos and half truths.

Hopefully, they will not be able to deceive enough people to win this very important upcoming election.

Chris Paige:

Whatever are you talking about? “…Bad things happen to good people when we do all of those things, and the irony is that history proves more bad things happen to more good people when we try to “fix” the market…”

Actually history proves the opposite. I am a retired trader and love the game. Toomey supports the faction that forgot the old axiom: pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. Sorry your guy crossed the line. Rick Santorum(the name not the noun) put it best – Toomey is FAR too right wing for Pennsylvania

Ken, Toomey created the Wall Street mess and now he’s OK because the mortages market was already “troubled”, what kind of crappy “excuse” is that…
The facts are that Toomey went to DC to help progress the troubled mortages market…
Sestak was in a GOP controlled congress when the “rot” went down and he alone could do nothing for it and at least he wanted to stand up against them, unlike Toomey…
Alot of memembers of Congress were “mislead” and lied to by the GOPers as they claimed that the mortage market was still stable and strong…

i’m in colorado. I have no idea what kind of ads toomey is running. But every time I see Sestak with his coat thrown over his shoulder I want to gag. He is such a poser! Surely the toomey camapign can use that to their advantage. GO TOOMEY!