Well, so much for the notion that City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is a fit custodian of New York City’s fiscal future.
Quinn, probably the morning-line favorite to succeed Mayor Bloomberg, is poised to push through the council a staggeringly irresponsible, legally dubious banking-regulation bill of the sort that only Occupy Wall Street-types could love.
The vote could come within weeks, and the bill is expected to pass handily.
The council, of course, has as much business regulating banks as it does dictating foreign policy.
Which is to say, none whatsoever.
A huge body of state and federal law already governs bank practices; numerous watchdogs — some would say too many — exist to see that they obey the rules.
Nonetheless, the legislation, Int. 485-A, dives head-first into the banking-oversight business. Should it become law, banks doing business with the city will be saddled with onerous new paperwork burdens.
Worse, they’ll face ham-handed pressure to adapt their business policies to suit the “credit and financial needs” of small businesses, homeowners, low- and moderate-income “communities,” “affordable housing” and “economic-development” projects and so on and so forth.
Banks would feel pressed to write off debt, make riskier loans and expand business into areas not conducive to sound business principles.
Quinn, through an aide, denied Friday that the goal is to “change anyone’s business practices.”
Yet that, of course, is precisely the point.
Banks that don’t go along can say good-bye to city business. And then they can hunker down and wait for the city’s banking commissioner to trash them for refusing to embrace the new “standards.”
That is, for refusing to knuckle under to hard-left policy prescriptions.
Quinn, once upon a time, made her contempt for such ridiculous nostrums clear.
Now she’s running full-tilt-boogie to her left — and no left-leaning scheme is too silly for her to embrace.
Just last week, she ditched a deal she’d cut to grant the mayor’s office leeway to soften job-killing legislation known as the “living wage” bill.
But the softening was a sop to begin with; she was against that bill strongly — before she was for it.
Ditto with another leftist, pro-union job-killer she championed, the so-called “prevailing wage” bill.
Quinn knows better.
She needs to cut it out.