Who is paying for Wall Street regs?
The President recently signed his new Wall Street regulations into effect. Huffington Post cheered Obama’s self-congratulatory words as he put his signature to paper;
Reveling over a new milestone in his presidency, a triumphant Barack Obama on Wednesday signed into law the most sweeping overhaul of lending and high-finance rules since the Great Depression, adding safeguards for millions of consumers and aiming to restrain Wall Street excesses that could set off a new recession.
So who is paying for it? Well over the last few months, every investment company which I use, save one, has jacked up my fiduciary fees, which means less of my money is being invested and I’ll have less money when I finally use it.
I’m not surprised and you can hardly blame those companies, after all they have to pay employees, but this another burden on the economy and another unnecessary burden on tax payers.
I only mention this because I just got another notice from a company I thought would avoid jacking up my fees and they didn’t.
Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Economy
I, for one, have begun to CRINGE whenever I see the term “sweeping overhaul.” All I hear is a cash
register ringing in the distance.
It’s the same anywhere, anytime, to anybody.
ANy increase of tax, fine, or fee is NOT paid by the company — it eventually is paid by the customer / consumer.
Unfortunately, the ones that these kinds of increases should be hitting the most, but aren’t, are those with “entitlements” (who get an offset to compensate for the increase) and their political keepers (who exempt themselves).
This ONLY affects the producing class.
About time to “Starve the Monkeys” and go Galt.
Yeah, the system we’ve had in place has worked so well for so many people I’m surprised they want to change it. But seriously, you guys have it exactly wrong. You’re penny wise and pound foolish. You bitch and moan about the relatively few dollars it will take to fund the “overhaul”, but you cannot seem to get it thru your thick skulls that it was lack of oversight and regulation that put us into a worldwide depression. In this case, in order to restrain human greed, selfishness and deceipt, government is not the problem, it’s the solution. Capitalism only works if it’s honest and transparent, something sadly lacking since, well, about the time of Ronald Reagan. It has fallen to the government to restore those honorable characteristics to our markets and our system.
Joe, I wish I could have your faith in our government. I don’t think more laws are going to help, and I am not at all sure the government can deliver on what it’s promising here. I think that we already have laws on the books that would cover just about any abuse that our financial institutions might be guilty of; the laws we have now need to be applied.
So, Joey, how does exempting the SEC from FOIA requests fit in with your pollyannish ideas of transparency? It’s transparent because Owebowma said it is? Or because Pelosi or Reid said it was, or are you worshipping at the trough of Dodd and Frank?
But, you did post a nugget of truth up there, namely since 2006 there hasn’t been any honesty or transparency, otherwise, Frank and Dodd would be having the same troubles that Rangel and Waters are having.
I’ll try and define transparency. Transparency is when you can understand the terms of your credit card statement. Transparency is when you when you sit down with a mortgage broker, he puts you in a mortgage with no hidden terms, a mortgage you can afford and understand. Transparency is when a stock broker has you invest in a financial instruments not so he can inflate the price and get out before the bubble bursts, but because it fits your needs. Transparency is when the people at Goldman Sachs don’t play both sides of the game and end up the only winners when the economy tanks. Transparency is when the brokers are not so insulated from the consequences of their decisions that they son’t have to share the pain when things go wrong. When bankers, mortgage brokers and stock brokers are as corrupt as a Afghan warlord, the entire system breaks down. Capitalism relies on trust. As very recent history has shown that when industries like those mentioned have little regulation and little oversight, the worst human tendencies rise to the surface – in fact with no oversight there is an incentive to break the rules to keep up with the competition, as we have seen. As Alan Greenspan so infamously stated a couple of years ago, “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms”. In other words, the nebulous incentives that were supposed to keep the financial industries honest were a joke, and pure human greed reared its ugly head. Government sure isn’t perfect, but I stand by my statement that in this case government isn’t the problem, it’s part of the solution.
#6 Joe:
Very lucid post. I’d add only one point:
Any form of government — or economic system, for that matter — would work well, if all people were honest.
#6
Bwahahahahahahahahaha!
Nuff said.
PintoNag,
Well, you’re making my case for some effective form of oversight, with teeth…..
Jacobite,
I take it you work in the financial industry.