One of the Donald Trump administration’s first orders of business on the economy will scuttle a rule protecting retirees from being scammed out of $17 billion a year by their own financial advisers.The Huffington Post
The Obama administration approved the regulation last year. The rule established a “fiduciary duty” for money managers, requiring them to operate retirement accounts in the best interests of their clients. The Trump team’s repeal will allow financial professionals to steer retirees into expensive or poor-performing products that carry economic benefits and perks for the advisers and their firms, without disclosing such conflicts of interest....
Donald Trump Signs Huge Wall Street Giveaway
Zach Carter | Senior Political Economy Reporter
18 comments:
Bill Black's expectation is criminality on an unprecedented scale, but because the GOPhers control the senate no investigations will ever be made. It's Wall Street's dream come true: fraud will be as close to legal as it can be, and they can defraud in the safe knowledge that they'll never have to account for their actions.
I look forward to hearing what Bill Black has to say about this.
In the meantime I view this EO as a baby step in the wrong direction, and bad politics for Trump, but hardly the end of the world.
The Obama rule that the EO rolls back had never actually gone into effect.
Dodd-Frank was never a satisfactory regulation. It might be best, politically speaking, if the GOP repeals it all together. That way, the next time there is a financial crash, the GOP will get blamed, and the public will demand reform.
As it stands, Dodd-Frank will not prevent the next crash, so when it happens Republicans will say "see, we told you the Dodd-Frank regulations would not work."
Dan, here's Bill in scathing form in the past few days. Enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Attl36lubmI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeVhU6Wq0ow&list=PLhvPB4lyc4dTJxRc7JptBbYDyWAvtzqIo&index=1
Thanks for the links, @John, but my monopolistic ISP will penalize me if I watch videos, so I'll have to wait until Bill comes out with a text op-ed on the subject.
Dan, as depressing as the information is, you'll enjoy the way Bill takes Trump apart beautifully in that forensic yet brutal way of his.
Bernie would have been a better reform candidate for ordinary people but his connections to the liberal, academic and green establishment was as pernicious and corrosive as Trump's connections to real estate and finance. The corrupted positions Bernie took on establishment issues almost certainly lost him the election (more than DNC manipulation).
As I said, in 8 years when we have a Democratic president again, those regulations will return. For me, it's more about how do I make the most amount of mula out of this move? That's right. I've become a lot more like Mike here and not caring so much anymore about these things.
Ryan, I'm pretty sure Bernie would have just been another Obama by the time he took power, causing mass disappointment among the progressive populace. I always thought of him as being very Ron Paul ish but for the progressives to hold onto and pretend to have hope in. Talks a good game, but his actions speak louder the words and what his voting record truly is. This is why I've developed a deep hatred for majority of politicians today. They are hot air clowns.
I think what Adams is calling 'persuasion' is just activating people's biases...
to me 'persuasion' would be actually overcoming someones biases...
Yves and Credit Slips saying the EO is a big nothing.
At heart, it says nothing. The press will probably make it into a big deal. ... I should clarify that I have no doubt the administration plans to gut Dodd-Frank. The order simply says "we plan to gut Dodd-Frank," and thus I don't find it particularly interesting.
I stand by my suggestion that it would be good politics to allow the GOP to repeal Dodd-Frank. There are some things worth fighting for and Dodd-Frank is not one of them.
Dan Lynch said...
Thanks for the links, @John, but my monopolistic ISP will penalize me if I watch videos, so I'll have to wait until Bill comes out with a text op-ed on the subject.
Dan, The Real News Network always supplies a transcript with their videos (scroll down). Just go to their site.
Dan, for the first link that John gave. This is the transxcript.
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=767&Itemid=74&jumival=18178
Dan, this is the second one that John mentions. Transcript right there.
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=767&Itemid=74&jumival=18248
Dan, you can also download the audio, which doesn't break your ISP's limit.
Thanks much for the links, MRW. :-) Audio is still bandwidth heavy, but transcripts work great, and I'm a speed reader so I can skim through the transcripts much faster than I could listen to the discussion.
Having read the transcripts, I agree with almost everything Bill says about the long term effects of deregulation, but Bill didn't address Dodd-Frank per se, or whether the sky would fall if Dodd-Frank is repealed, just that deregulation is bad in general and will come back to bite us in the ass.
Jared Bernstein does claim that the "the sky will fall if Dodd-Frank is repealed", but he is not very convincing.
I disagree with Trump's deregulation agenda, but in the short run Trump might pull off a Bill Clinton or a Ronald Reagan, goosing the economy with tax cuts and deregulation. By the time the shit hits the fan, Trump may be gone and someone else may take the fall.
As for Bill's suggestion that whistleblowers will doom Trump, what dirt could they possibly reveal that Trump supporters don't already assume? The era when a scandal could bring down a politician is largely over. Most people today assume that politicians are corrupt dirtbags, and that's OK as long as the corrupt dirtbag does something for them.
I am resigned to the fact that we are in a dark age, not just because of Trump, but because of the global trend toward neoliberalism and authoritarianism. The generation that lived through the Great Depression and WWII is dead and the lessons of that era went to the grave with them. We seemed determined to set the clock back to the 1920's and 30's and live through that all over again. :-( Grab some popcorn, enjoy the spectacle, and those of us who survive will regroup when the dust settles.
I was listening to NPR while driving yesterday and a conservative was talking about regulations. He said that of course regulation is needed for public safety, for example, but excessive regulation stifles business and costs jobs. The challenge is getting regulation right in a highly politicized environment in which one side flavors no regulation to promote growth and the other side favors high regulation to address often non-existent problems that favor a constituency.
Again, the nuance is missing in a highly politicized environment and ill-informed voters..
Now I'm the first to admit I haven't read Dodd-Frank... Best I can do is get info from various people I respect.. But I've heard the opinion that it is in fact working. But it's not the direct attack that'd we'd like to see. Instead, it's death by a thousand cuts, bog them down in compliance costs.. B/c If you were a politician that tried to attack wall street directly, Dimon and Blankflein would reach into their couch cushions, pull out some spare change (more than most entire city blocks in america earn in a lifetime) and you won't get elected dog catcher.
Any truth to this? (If it is true, it's a nice bit of political strategery. But it's far beyond the intellectual capabilities of most politicians, so I am skeptical of this explanation.)
I haven't read Dodd-Frank either, and finance is not my strong point, anyway.
The Minskian/Keen position, as I understand it, is that financial stability is endemic to capitalism, that financial regulations like Dodd-Frank or Glass-Steagall will have limited success in preventing recessions and crashes, and that the government will still have to step in to provide liquidity and provide aggregate demand.
That doesn't mean that we shouldn't regulate finance. If for no other reason, a lot of financial activity seems to be unproductive and parasitic.
Supposedly Dodd-Frank has a provision to break up big banks, but no big banks have actually been broken up. Should we hold our breath?
All credit creation and destruction creates and destroys dollars, so in effect, aren't all shadow banks and investment banks public utilities that affect the general welfare, even if some law says that the public shouldn't be responsible for shadow banks and investment banks?
Five (underwelming) ways Dodd-Frank has benefited you.
Trump might pull off a Bill Clinton or a Ronald Reagan, goosing the economy
Reagan did it with massive deficit spending and tax increases. Clinton gets credit for luck - low oil prices, tech and productivity booms, etc. that stimulated the economy, as well as declining (at least initially) military budgets following the so-called end of the Cold War. Billy sold us down the river economically with NAFTA, deregulating Wall St., etc.
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