During a press briefing yesterday, White House press secretary Dana Perino was asked to explain the “accusation that the White House is to blame in some way, or the Bush administration policy is to blame in some way” for the current financial crisis.

Perino responded by issuing a challenge: “I would ask you to go back and look…what specific regulation did they want that we blocked? What specific regulation did we eliminate?”

The Wonk Room gladly took up the Perino challenge. Here are some of the specific regulations of the financial system that the Bush administration has eliminated:

- The Uptick Rule: In July 2007, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) eliminated the “uptick rule,” which “made it hard for speculators to push the price of a stock down after betting it would fall.” As the Wonk Room noted yesterday, “since then, legions of short sellers have progressively hammered Wall Street, contributing greatly to the current stock market crisis.”

- The Net Capital Rule: In 2004, the SEC loosened the “net capital” rule, which required “that broker dealers limit their debt-to-net capital ratio to 12-to-1.” The five investment banks that qualified for an alternative rule – Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley – were allowed “to increase their debt-to-net capital ratios, sometimes, as in the case of Merrill Lynch, to as high as 40-to-1.”

- State Laws Against Predatory Lending: In 2003, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) issued regulations that exempted national banks from state laws against predatory lending. As Slate reported, “with the state laws nullified, national banks were free to engage in the sharp practices the states were hoping to stamp out.”

The Bush administration eliminated these “specific regulations,” contributing to the specific mess that the financial system is in today.

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Our guest blogger is Ed Paisley, Vice President for Editorial at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) this morning attempted to blame the entirety of today’s runaway global financial crisis on…Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL). The reason: the failure of U.S. home mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac due to their investments in subprime mortgages.

Problem is, Fan and Fred’s chief regulator — the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) — is responsible for the government bailout of these two institutions because it failed to prevent them from investing in these toxic mortgages, despite its clear mandate to ensure “the safety and soundness” of the two institutions.

What’s worse, OFHEO (a unit of the Department of Housing and Urban Development) allowed Fannie and Freddie to invest in these mortgages when it was clear that abusive lending practices had created this toxic mess – practices that the Federal Reserve failed to prevent. If the Bush administration and a conservative Congress (including Sen. McCain) had not appointed or nominated and approved federal supervisors who made clear they planned to deliver less supervision over the financial services industry, the U.S. financial markets and economy might not be in such dire straits today.

The collapse of Fannie and Freddie, however, was patently not the beginning of the latest leg of this crisis, as McCain would have Americans believe. That moment in history is the collapse of U.S. insurance giant American International Group Inc., which issued over $40 billion in credit default swaps – a form of insurance on subprime mortgage-backed securities that turbocharged the sale of these securities because they seemed “safe and sound” — that it couldn’t honor, forcing the Federal Reserve earlier this week to buy control of the failing company for $85 billion. And who is the most responsible for the completely unregulated credit fault swap marketplace? Well, that would be Sen. McCain’s likely Treasury Secretary, former Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, who made sure in one of his last legislative victories in 2000 that the now $60 trillion (yes, trillion) market for credit default swaps would remain unregulated.

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Our guest blogger is Peter Edelman, Professor of Law at the Georgetown Law Center.

I was appalled at Justice Antonin Scalia’s remarks at the Federalist Society about poverty law being “made-up stuff.”

We have 37 million people who live in poverty in this incredibly wealthy nation, and there is a long list of ways in which the law that affects them, either as written or as applied, is all too real. I doubt that Scalia has been in landlord-tenant court recently, or seen how many employers get away with flouting fair labor standards laws, or noticed the myriad of ways in which legal (or, sometimes, illegal) credit practices like payday loans get their claws into people, or watched as people struggle to obtain public benefits to which the law says they have a legal right.

Sometimes the law is on the side of the poor, but the dearth of lawyers to represent the poor make the legal protections irrelevant, and sometimes laws, having been written by landlords and business lobbies, need to be re-examined and rewritten.

But one thing I can tell Justice Scalia. There is a real thing called poverty law, and if he would go to the South or West side of Chicago instead of the Union League Club, he might even find it.

Our guest blogger is Ed Paisley, Vice President for Editorial at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Six months ago, the U.S. housing and global credit crises seemed manageable to the Bush administration. So manageable, in fact, that U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson unveiled a widely discussed blueprint for U.S. financial regulatory reform that called for less supervision of Wall Street by the Securities and Exchange Commission, more of the same lax supervision of the financial derivative products at the heart of today’s global market meltdown by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and much more risk to taxpayers to be taken on board courtesy of expanded powers for the Federal Reserve.

Back then, Mr. Paulson said in a speech that the plan detailed the administration’s desire to ease financial regulation. Bush administration spokeswoman Dana Perino seems to have forgotten the details in the plan when she told reporters yesterday that the administration “had a regulatory blueprint for them to follow, and they declined not to”—the “they” being Congress.

Perino was responding to a question from a reporter about whether the ultimate responsibility for today’s massive financial meltdown rests with the deregulatory philosophy of the Bush Administration and Congress, under the leadership of conservatives for more than a decade until two years ago. She gamely tried to deflect the question by blaming the regulators—as if these officials were not proposed by conservatives and in large part confirmed overwhelmingly by a conservative Congress that wanted to know they would do as little supervisory work as possible.

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