Wall Street Profits Just Aren’t High Enough, Darn It

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You come to Mother Jones for unique journalism, and we love doing it for you. That's it. That's the upshot of our fall fundraising drive, and we're hoping to raise $250,000 in a shorter than normal three-week window so we can keep right on doing it.

It’s been ten years since Wall Street destroyed the world, and apparently that’s plenty of time for them to have learned their lesson:

Federal bank regulators on Wednesday unveiled a sweeping plan to soften the Volcker Rule, opening the door for banks to resume some trading activities restricted as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law. The changes would give the largest banks significant freedom to engage in more complicated — and possibly riskier — activities by largely leaving it up to Wall Street firms to determine which trading is permissible under the rule and which is not.

The Federal Reserve, along with four other regulators, took steps on Wednesday to ease several parts of the Volcker Rule, which was put in place to prevent banks from making risky bets with depositors’ money. The rule, which took the agencies more than three years to write, has been criticized by Wall Street as onerous and harmful to the proper functioning of financial markets.

My guess is that banks found the Volcker Rule onerous and harmful to their profits, and that’s about it. I haven’t noticed that financial markets in general have had any serious trouble functioning lately.

Of course, I haven’t noticed that financial sector profits are in any serious trouble either. But if you’re in the financial sector, I guess no amount of profit is ever enough.