Well the idea of a transaction tax is not exactly new, and I guess could be made to be semiglobal.

That leaves the problem of taxhavens, but you have them now and they won’t go away easily.

So what? Now, I would argue that some of these “products” and “solutions” would have worked fine if they had been populated with good investments to begin with. But they weren’t. They were populated with crap. First, by accident, then later it appears that it was on purpose in an effort to dissipate the crapiness of the the crap.

Let’s remember some of the examples from Richard Bookstaber’s book: The more complex the system, them more opportunity for catastrophic failure and the less ability to mitigate it. The system is only as good as its weakest link. With mortgages, the weakest link wasn’t on Wall Street, guys. The weakest link was the mortgage officer and the oversite of their workflow. They weren’t being compensated for quality of mortgage aps, they were compensated for quantity of mortgage aps. There were few qualifications to becoming a mortgage officer, whether at a bank or at a mortgage brokerage shop. There was little oversite. The system was set to fail at point one. The best outcome possible was failure in the end.

Now, you can fault Wall Street for being enablers–providing a venue for banks to get their crap off their books. But there was a natural point to stop lending and banks themselves chose to get creative and do paired mortgages, ninja loans, negative amortizing, teaser rates, … You can rail on Wall Street all you want, but they weren’t the mastermind, only a participant.

Now, what of AIG??? Is that Wall Street? Umm, I think that is the insurance industry. The only financial entity to successfully duck having a Federal Regulatory Body dedicated to oversite. I want their lobbying groups because, damn they’re good. Somehow, they’ve convinced the Federal government that most of their business is already well regulated because each state has it’s own insurance commission… yeah, right. Somehow they were able to create an insurance product, not call it “insurance” so it could be unregulated: voila!! CDS-credit default swap… You want to talk about an industry that made schmucks out of all of us? Insurance boys, insurance… The mob can’t do it better than them.

Maybe the path we’re taking is going to be a longer, more drawn out, more painful path by propping up JPM, C, BAC, etc… but it seems we are too far down this path to change coarse… There probably was a better way that might have been more painful short term, but better long term–but that time has past.

You know, it would be nice to hear some contrition from these politicians too! These buffoons that are haranguing Wall St and everyone else are the same confederacy of dunces that unlocked the liquor cabinet, cranked the stereo, and raided the fridge at this party! And now that we’re all busted, they’re the backstabbing people you hated in school.

You want to affect change? Do it at the voting booth. Actually take some time and vote your proxies based on what YOU think, not some proxy service or tossing it. You want this system to be better? Don’t be complicit when everything seems to be good. What is it that grizzled veterans say? “Vigilance is the price of freedom”

We are all angry, but it does no good towards solving the problems we have. You want to help? Get involved in the political game. Write congress people. Help Obama keep on task and not go too far left! Help at a charity. Give to your church food pantry. But don’t be haters leaving flaming messages on blogs. What good does that do?

A one percent transaction tax on every stock and bond transaction.

This will solve our biggest problem, falling real estate prices, almost over night!

I can see it now.

In no time at all, every last penny (minus 1%) will have been pulled out of the stock and bond markets and INVESTED IN REAL ESTATE !!!! Housing prices will ZOOM!

There won’t be a single bad loan in the entire world and we will all be saved.

Ahhh….the unintended consequences. Gotta love ‘em!

JayBondman

I know BR is being cheeky, but he may be onto something!

Glad you are doing well…the salt mine is losing a partner in June due to divorce, so we won’t be quite as big…I imagine all of us together don’t make enough to pay for your cab fare…

…but the TARP guys are wearing night-vision goggles.

Again, I am no banker…