The President is backing a plan promoted by Paul Volcker that puts "limits on bank size and prohibits commercial banks from trading for their own accounts — known as proprietary trading."
First, may I say, you have to appreciate Paul Volcker. Addressing the world's highest-level bankers, who were worried about regulations on "financial innovations," he told them that their vaunted "financial innovations" were fiction, and that the lowly ATM machine was the most important financial innovation of the past twenty years.
As for Volcker's proposal, now adopted by the President, the Republican "default position" is always to support big banks. Also today, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations can pour as much money into politics as they want. Likewise, Republicans can be trusted to support corporate money in politics. (The Supreme Court decision was 5-4, with five of the Court's seven Republicans in the majority.)
Their positions on both of those issues will be political losers, especially when the public finds out that Volcker's proposal would affect only the largest of banks, specifically Goldman-Sachs, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan. Ouch! You don't want to be the political face of that crowd these days.
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