WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — President Barack Obama told reporters on Monday that Congress is impeding efforts to prevent Wall Street financial institutions from throttling the nation’s economy as in the 2008 crisis that triggered the so-called Great Recession, according to a White House press pool report.
"If there is a significant challenge in terms of regulating Wall Street and regulating our financial sector, it is primarily coming from certain members of Congress who are consistently pressuring independent regulators to back off," Obama stated on Monday, according to the report.
Obama spoke with reporters briefly at the beginning of a meeting with Federal Reserve Board Chairman Janet Yellen, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Director Richard Cordray and others.
"The laws that we've passed have worked," the poll report quoted Obama as saying. "It is popular in the media, and political discourse both on the left and on the right to suggest that the crisis happened and nothing changed. That is not true."
A primary criticism is that no Wall Street executives have faced criminal prosecution for hiding billions of dollars in shaky mortgages by creating financial instruments known as mortgage backed securities.
The securities were aggressively marketed to banks and other investors, creating massive losses that threatened the entire US banking system with collapse.
