Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Excessive Wall St Skimming

Wall Street exists to route society's capital into economic development. They haven't done a very good job lately, and in fact, stupid Wall St moves are largely responsible for Great Depression 2.0.
Right now, while the wounds are still fresh, we ought to outlaw, or at least tax the bejeezus out of, risky Wall St speculation scams that do not yield economic growth, or create vast surpluses. The "credit default swaps" don't invest money in the real economy, they are just a cover your ass maneuver. Underlings can make risky investments and tell their bosses "It's safe, I bought a credit default swap to insure it". When all the investments went bad at the same time, AIG couldn't pay off, we taxpayers had to cover AIG's bad bets.
Resale of mortgages and the "mortgage backed security" are scams that allow unscrupulous operators to sell mortgages that should never have been written and dump them on more gullible investors before the junk mortgage goes into repossession.
Credit rating agencies were paid to put AAA ratings on junk, and gullible investors bought the junk. We don't need that kind of credit rating agency. Actually, any broker worth his salt should do his own rating. We would do our selves a favor by taxing the credit rating agencies like Moody's right out of business.
We need to create some corporate governance. Right now the management runs the banks pretty much the way they like. The pay them selves and their buds outrageous salaries with money that by rights belongs to the stockholders. We need to give the stockholders and the boards of directors more say over company operations. For instance top management salaries ought to require a majority vote from the stockholders. Big moves ought to require board of directors say-so.
Then we need to clean up the accounting business. American "Generally Accepted Principles of Accounting" allow companies to carry purely imaginary assets on the books, allow ordinary running expenses to be "capitalized", and allow "sales" to be credited as income before the money comes in. Plus a bunch of other unsavory stuff.

We ought to demand Wall St reform from our Congress critters.

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