It never ceases to amaze me how the political class thinks they are so much smarter than the rest of us. They think they can write a 2,000 page law that will really “fix” things and don’t believe that all the intellectual horsepower in America can’t disassemble their work in a matter of days. Today’s political class is too dumb to realize Thomas Paine was right and still is, “that government is best that governs least.”
This is from Fox Business News. Goldman Sachs has figured out a way to get around the Volker Rule’s restrictions on trading that was just enacted in the Dodd-Frank Act. It is doing this by changing its “risk taking- traders into asset managers.”
The move is designed to exploit a loophole in the Volker Rule, part of the recently signed financial-reform legislation named after presidential economic adviser and former Federal Reserve chief Paul Volcker. The Volcker Rule is supposed to scale back on Wall Street risk taking by ending what’s known as proprietary trading, where firms use their own ideas and capital to make market bets.
But by having the traders work in asset management, where they will take market positions while dealing with clients, Goldman believes it can meet the rule’s mandates, avoid large-scale layoffs and preserve some of the same risk taking that has earned it enormous profits, people close to the firm say.
This is really about the arrogance of those who have been breathing the heady air of Washington, DC for too long. From way up in those ivory towers they can’t see that among those on the ground are the most brilliant minds in the world and before one of their lofty laws tossed from the tower hits the ground, the huddled masses will turn it into mince meat. Why does Medicare/Medicaid lose $60 – $100 billion a year to fraud? Because for every beltway pinhead writing a regulatory rule, there are 100,000 people reading that same rule and finding all the ways to get around it and how to use the same rule to tie the government in knots so it can’t stop them.
Are they really that arrogant? When asked that question John Kerry sniffed and said, “Let them pay taxes.” He then cackled, stepped on to his 74 foot yacht Isabel and sailed off into the sunset, quaffing champagne as he went.
