WASHINGTON (CN) - Reverting to the Clinton Administration's policies on federalism, President Obama has admonished his departments and agencies not to steam-roll over states' rights without a sufficient legal basis, and has asked them to review all federal regulations in the last 10 years intended to preempt state law.
     Quoting U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brandeis, the president asserted that states have the privilege to try "novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country," and that the federal government should stay out of it without legal justification, which includes principles outlined in President Bill Clinton's Executive Order 13132.
     President George W. Bush's administration had scattered preemption provisions throughout federal regulations whether legally justified or not, often aiding businesses in getting around unfavorable state laws. Bush's agencies also included in some introductions to regulations that the agency planned to preempt state law, even when the federal regulation's having precedence over state laws actually was not part of the regulation.

Download Memorandum of May 20, 2009:
http://www.courthousenews.com/2009/05/28/LeadRegMay2609%20preemption.doc

A Bush rule enabled businesses to automatically enroll  workers into 401(k)  plans. If the workers failed to specify how they wanted their money invested, the company was required by law to place their retirement money in investment funds that, for the most part, relied heavily on stocks. About two-thirds of workers opted into such plans before 2006, and participation was expected to rise to more than 90 percent with an auto-enrollment provision.
The administration specifically rejected safer investment options when Congress left it up to the Bush administration to determine what categories of funds should be allowed. The administration rejected the pleas of stable value fund managers to have their product be available as a stand-alone option for automatically enrolled workers, reasoning that the funds would be vastly outperformed by stock-heavy investments over the long term. The administration asserted that the stable value funds would not provide "meaningful retirement savings over the long term."

From:
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2009/04/05/workers_steered_to_high_risk_investing/

The S&P 500 is down 11% in the first 12 trading days of 2009, exceeding last year’s 9.2 % drop, according to data compiled by Bloomberg going back to 1928. The decline helped erase more than two-thirds of a 24 percent rally since Nov. 20 as optimism that government spending would revive the economy evaporated.

‘Effectively Insolvent’

U.S. financial losses from the credit crisis may reach $3.6 trillion, according to New York University Professor Nouriel Roubini, who predicted last year’s economic and stock-market meltdowns.

“If that’s true, it means the U.S. banking system is effectively insolvent because it starts with a capital of $1.4 trillion,” Roubini said at a conference in Dubai today. “This is a systemic banking crisis.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aOYw.awwsNSg&refer=worldwide

Nothing left but the prosecution.






============================================