Wall Street is a vast complicated gambling parlor. They play for high stakes and despite the collegiate credentials and the thousand dollar suits, the odds are more contrived than Las Vegas. The main difference is in Black Jack there is one dealer, while on Wall Street many manipulators stir the pot.
The actual bets, or “investments” in wall street parlance, contain formulas that no one quite understands. Not the buyers, not the politicians, and apparently not the SEC. What is understood is that if the funds goes bust and the investors take a soaking, the money managers walk away with full pockets. And so do their friends.
And they have a new insurance plan called TARP so they can’t lose.
Outside the publics view, Wall Street money flows into campaign coffers, and into market managers bank accounts. When the inside wheeler dealers dramatically over reached in 2008, TARP was quickly passed like a gift for the bridal envelope. The buying public got a peek into how manipulated and politicized the mess really was, and as the bag holders, they got hopping mad about it. Government said the concerns were “too big to fail”. More likely the ugliness was too big to be exposed. As a few Bernie Madoffs’ surfaced like seltzer bubbles a select few finally had to go to jail, but beyond political posturing the system remained largely intact.
TARP rescued the market manipulators.
Though traditionally Republicans have romanced Wall Street, a new President and a new congress is sensing the opportunity to change the status quo. The pot is huge and not so coincidentally the democrats have picked this moment in history to be concerned about Wall Street corruption. This concern however doesn’t include exposing the players, many of whom now sit in government jobs, uncovering past cover ups, or truly defining what banks and brokerage houses should and should not do. In other words the focus is not on cleaning up the town but on controlling the money that flows through it.
Do we need “derivative” legislation? We do need something but not new bureaucracies with untold funding needs and new phone book sized rules to monitor. There is absolutely no justification for a penny of new deficit spending. We have more than enough people, departments, and agencies in position now. We just need them to do there job.
We need common sense application of the laws we already have and real oversight of the bureaucracies that now exist. Virtually everybody knows the process and the purpose of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is behind the failure that snowballed into a crisis. Let‘s review that before we write new laws. Review them and if appropriate, close them.
There are things we can do right now. Banks should not be brokerage houses for reasons that are too obvious to explain, even though congress can’t quite grasp it. Brokerage houses should not be able to bet against the investments they market as good prospects, as Goldman Sachs appeared to do, by simultaneously selling the same investment short in their private portfolio. We don’t need to create new agencies to do this. We need people in the agencies that now exist with the grit to say loudly, this is wrong as it happens, regardless of how large a campaign contribution is in the wings.
To this day, even after almost a trillion in bailout funds have changed hands, no one knows the specifics of the investments labeled “toxic. No one knows what they are, or even where they are. We cannot account for how the bail out money was used. When you cannot account for what you are selling you shouldn’t be selling it. This is what needs to be changed. We can skip designing new offices and personnel courtesy of the American taxpayer.
Until there is anything resembling full disclosure of what really happened during the credit and financial market collapse and a commitment to disband the social and fiscally destructive mechanisms of Fannies and Freddies, new created agencies with new budgets are just new excesses of the future, with the old ones still in place.
About the author
William Burton wrote 26 articles on this blog.
A political junkie with a home spun view of politics, passionately conservative. Published writer (short stories, political essays, poems), and public speaker. Profiled in, "The Ridiculous Race" by Steve Heely.
The Real Government Interest In Wall Street Is Control Of The Money
The actual bets, or “investments” in wall street parlance, contain formulas that no one quite understands. Not the buyers, not the politicians, and apparently not the SEC. What is understood is that if the funds goes bust and the investors take a soaking, the money managers walk away with full pockets. And so do their friends.
And they have a new insurance plan called TARP so they can’t lose.
Outside the publics view, Wall Street money flows into campaign coffers, and into market managers bank accounts. When the inside wheeler dealers dramatically over reached in 2008, TARP was quickly passed like a gift for the bridal envelope. The buying public got a peek into how manipulated and politicized the mess really was, and as the bag holders, they got hopping mad about it. Government said the concerns were “too big to fail”. More likely the ugliness was too big to be exposed. As a few Bernie Madoffs’ surfaced like seltzer bubbles a select few finally had to go to jail, but beyond political posturing the system remained largely intact.
TARP rescued the market manipulators.
Though traditionally Republicans have romanced Wall Street, a new President and a new congress is sensing the opportunity to change the status quo. The pot is huge and not so coincidentally the democrats have picked this moment in history to be concerned about Wall Street corruption. This concern however doesn’t include exposing the players, many of whom now sit in government jobs, uncovering past cover ups, or truly defining what banks and brokerage houses should and should not do. In other words the focus is not on cleaning up the town but on controlling the money that flows through it.
Do we need “derivative” legislation? We do need something but not new bureaucracies with untold funding needs and new phone book sized rules to monitor. There is absolutely no justification for a penny of new deficit spending. We have more than enough people, departments, and agencies in position now. We just need them to do there job.
We need common sense application of the laws we already have and real oversight of the bureaucracies that now exist. Virtually everybody knows the process and the purpose of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is behind the failure that snowballed into a crisis. Let‘s review that before we write new laws. Review them and if appropriate, close them.
There are things we can do right now. Banks should not be brokerage houses for reasons that are too obvious to explain, even though congress can’t quite grasp it.
Brokerage houses should not be able to bet against the investments they market as good prospects, as Goldman Sachs appeared to do, by simultaneously selling the same investment short in their private portfolio. We don’t need to create new agencies to do this. We need people in the agencies that now exist with the grit to say loudly, this is wrong as it happens, regardless of how large a campaign contribution is in the wings.
To this day, even after almost a trillion in bailout funds have changed hands, no one knows the specifics of the investments labeled “toxic. No one knows what they are, or even where they are. We cannot account for how the bail out money was used. When you cannot account for what you are selling you shouldn’t be selling it. This is what needs to be changed. We can skip designing new offices and personnel courtesy of the American taxpayer.
Until there is anything resembling full disclosure of what really happened during the credit and financial market collapse and a commitment to disband the social and fiscally destructive mechanisms of Fannies and Freddies, new created agencies with new budgets are just new excesses of the future, with the old ones still in place.
About the author
William Burton wrote 26 articles on this blog.
A political junkie with a home spun view of politics, passionately conservative. Published writer (short stories, political essays, poems), and public speaker. Profiled in, "The Ridiculous Race" by Steve Heely.
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