Recap: Obama speech on five-year anniversary of financial crisis

September 16, 2013, 11:34 AM ET

Reuters

Read a recap of a live blog from MarketWatch’s Rob Schroeder of President Barack Obama’s speech on the fifth anniversary of the financial crisis. The president also spoke about the shootings on Monday morning at the Navy Yard in Washington.

It was five years ago this week that Lehman Brothers collapsed and the financial crisis began. In a report released Sunday night, the White House laid out steps it took to combat the crisis and results including recovering investments in the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Read the report.

Obama has a couple other economy-focused events scheduled this week: on Wednesday he speaks to the Business Roundtable, a group of CEOs. And on Friday he goes to the Ford Kansas City assembly plant to give another speech about the reaction to the financial crisis.

D.C. officials’ briefing is over. To turn back to the financial crisis, it’s worth noting that many of the Dodd-Frank law’s rules — including the Volcker rule — haven’t yet been finalized.

For a handy Dodd-Frank progress report, check this out from law firm Davis Polk. Its latest report shows that 280 rulemaking requirement deadlines have passed as of September 3. Of those passed deadlines, 61% have been missed and 39% have been met with finalized rules.

Republicans point out that the U.S. jobless rate is stuck over 7% and charge that Obama’s health-care law will slow the economy. Don’t be surprised if Obama uses his speech to call on Republicans to raise the U.S. debt ceiling and avoid a government shutdown.

He says he wants to do everything we can to try to prevent shootings, before switching to Syria. Over the weekend, we took an important step to moving Syria’s chemical weapons under control so they can be destroyed. But “we’re not there yet,” he says.

Now Obama gets to the meat of the speech: rebuilding the U.S. economy so it can work for everybody. It was five years ago this week that the financial crisis rocked Wall Street and sent the economy into a tailspin, Obama says.

Unemployment rate has come down, our financial system is safer, we sell more goods to rest of the world than before, Obama says. He goes on to plug his health-care law, which Republicans want to repeal. “We’ve cleared away the rubble from the financial crisis,” he says, and begun to lay a foundation for prosperity.

He’s slamming the GOP for what he says are deeper cuts to infrastructure, education and other areas. “They’re not the policies that would help grow the middle class.” He points to the fastest-falling U.S. deficits since World War II.

That’s all for today’s live blog of the president’s financial-crisis anniversary speech. He used a big part of it to joust with Republicans over raising the U.S. debt ceiling and hammering out a budget deal. There are only two weeks until the end of this fiscal year, so keep it at MarketWatch for coverage.