A User's Guide to Financial Reform

Reader Comments
Back to blog

Hey rick. Great review....However I dont think the reforms get to the bottom of the problem. The entire system is not only corrupt but corrupting. You have to be a saint or a fool not to participate. How do we reform that. Did you see William Black on Bill Moyers. I think reform has to have more cops on the beat in order to throw a few of top... See More guys into long term hard time. That's the only way to get their attention. Anything that doesnt include this will be just more rules for them to game. They are taught how to do this in the top law and business schools...

Dean Echenberg of CA 10:42AM April 24, 2010

Is it like HCR?
Does each of us have to open an account & pay whatever the finance company demands?

Miriam of NY 11:51PM April 23, 2010

The Volcker Rule will definitely hurt the company I work for.
The premiums customers pay for property and casualty insurance are held in reserves for catastrophes, paid out throughout the year for claims, reinvested to earn interest and at the end of the year if claims and catastrophes were low and if earned interest on the residuals were good the company gives money back to the customers (over $1B last year).
Also, no TARP funds have been accepted, or needed for that matter. The company is healthy, the customers are happy and the employees were not fearful of a layoff until this rule came to light. If investment opportunities dry up, expense reductions will be required...i.e. cancelled projects, fewer people on the phones, and potentially less employees. The only other opportunity is to raise rates which is difficult to impossible since state insurance regulators like being re-elected.
This current administration worries me. Never are things so black and white.

Enstad of TX 7:03PM April 23, 2010

"Profits are the mothers' milk of the business world" and real job creation is wholly dependent on those profits. So, we want our big banks and hedge funds to be very profitable from secret trading for their own accounts, right?
Has it occurred to anyone that when "trading" is the business of the biggest money outfits (and when they're making money) that there are counter-parties on the other sides of the trades who are losing that money? Do you have any idea who is losing money when Goldman-Sachs and all its wannabee firms are making money? Do you know whether or not it might be you (in, say, the prices of gasoline or other fuel to heat/cool your home), or you (in the recent decline of the value of your house), or your retirement savings (in stocks flying up and down with questionable volatility over the years)?
We had better hope that government can gather all the control it possibly can over trading operations. MOST citizens are paying a far higher tax to the traders than they are to federal income tax---and have no idea of it.

Muser of NM 6:18PM April 23, 2010