“Too big” failed on Wall Street in 2008 in a tumultuous explosion that wiped out century old iconoclastic institutions in a week’s time. In their infinite wisdom, Congress and the regulators repaired “too big” with “much bigger,” bundling giant insolvent institutions with the merely teetering. We’re now at the third stage: “much, much crazier to regulate.”
To attempt to oversee the unwieldy bloated tyrants, Congress passed 848 pages of financial reform legislation in 2010. But it was so difficult to comprehend that to implement just one piece of it, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) together with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency filed a 530-page public proposal seeking comment on how the legislation might impact the markets. The deadline for those comments came last week.
To hear the New York Times tell it, a less than dazzling few hundred public comment letters were filed. The Times tally was off by a mere 16,000 letters. Apparently, the Times does not believe form letters should count, even though they were signed individually and filed electronically with the SEC by the February 13 deadline. (I think anytime 16,442 members of the public take the trouble to comment on a notoriously complex 530-page proposal from the SEC, they deserve to be counted.)
The rule proposal pertained to the adoption of the Volcker Rule – the namesake of former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker that would nix the ability of Wall Street banks that hold insured deposits to place billions of dollars in speculative trades for their own firm’s account (proprietary trading or in Wall Street vernacular “prop desk”) instead of focusing on the interests of their customers.
The Volcker Rule constitutes Section 619 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act signed into law on July 21, 2010. In addition to proprietary trading, also impacted will be the ability of Wall Street banks to own hedge funds and private equity funds. The new rules are scheduled to take effect on July 21 of this year if Wall Street lobbyists lose their bid to derail the implementation.
Hoping to derail the derailers is a new SEC sheriff: Occupy the SEC, a spinoff of Occupy Wall Street. Going forward, it will be tougher for right-wing corporate media to spin the Occupy movement as smelly hippie radicals desperate for a cause; any cause. Last week, Wall Street spin doctors just got chewed up in the spin cycle and hung out to dry with Occupy the SEC’s filing of a mesmerizing 325-page treatise on redesigning Wall Street to meet the Nation’s needs rather than its perpetuation as a wealth extraction scheme by lawyered up 1 percenters. (The number of lawyers providing public comment was exceeded only by Wall Street firms.)
Far removed from the unstructured demands of the overall Occupy movement, the 325-page tome is precise, hard hitting and essentially nails the core corrupting elements of the current system and lays out what must change. It shows an uncanny insider’s grasp of the minutiae in the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation. And, it is more than 171 pages longer than the collective rant of Wall Street’s own sycophant trade groups, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), American Bankers Association, the Financial Services Roundtable, and the Clearing House Association. The trade group letter called the proposal “absurd” and lectured the regulators that they should first “do no harm.” There is striking and arrogant amnesia in this letter regarding the staggering harm done to this Nation by their constituents.
Occupy the SEC was able to convince the SEC to schedule it for a telephone conference on January 12 to discuss the proposed rule prior to filing its weighty volume. Unfortunately, its one meet-up with the SEC was outflanked by a total of 20 SEC confabs with big Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and their trade and lobby organizations.
Occupy the SEC
Occupy the SEC
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/20/ ... ll-street/
Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.
-Alexander Hamilton
-Alexander Hamilton
Re: Occupy the SEC
This makes a lot of sense and would put 'skin in the game' for anyone who has a checking account.In the absence of something like Volcker Rule, we have a heads I win, tails you lose system in which, if I’m a bank I can go out and buy mortgage-backed securities (‘Triple A rated’) . . . they make a bunch of money, I keep that, I do not give that to those depositors, [whose money] I use. . . . But if I lose a bunch of money, I’m coming to the taxpayer to save me. And it seems so unfair.
“…We know of no bank that repays FDIC-insured depositors for usage of their money in the form of participation interests on the proceeds from proprietary trading. This is an exploitative situation wherein the resources of one party are utilized by another, without just compensation—a clear ‘divergence of interests.’ Thus, simple logic dictates that depositors must be granted some monetary participation in any gains achieved by a banking entity from exempted activities…”
Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.
-Alexander Hamilton
-Alexander Hamilton
