Ass-kissing moral coward

And I can't wait for Gettysburg and Appomattox ... But that's getting ahead of things.

“We must embrace the antimonopoly spirit that has animated American debates about finance for more than 250 years.” This article lays out how Dodd-Frank failed, and why antimonopoly thinking can animate a response the next time Wall Street crashes the economy. 1/17

A fantastic 🧵 from Carter. I don’t know a lot about the world of finance, but I have spent my career thinking about good governance, & am acutely aware of the importance of systemic incentives. Trying to regulate an industry rooted in incentives misaligned with the public interest will always fail.

'Twas fun ... A tale of corporate power and an antimonopoly fight!

This will be a big dilemma in 2027:

But “egregious concentrations of market power in finance” now vex the American economy and progressives have spent too much time defending Dodd-Frank. Read the kicker here: 17/end

Yes, Dodd-Frank will leave some good things behind. A key one is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose employees, former and current, “count among the most talented and tenacious in government.” 16/17

Finance & real economy ... We need a Financial Monopolies Control Act: “This project will demand new thinking that considers traditional antitrust law, deregulation over the past 40 years, and new developments in finance to update laws separating banking from commerce.” 15/17

We’re going to need new ideas for how to de-monopolize the payment system. Happily, there are smart thinkers and lawmakers already on the case. I’ve got a list, here’s a selection: 14/17

And we’re back to the problem of financial control of industry mainly, though by no means entirely, via the private equity business: “They control or heavily influence vast swaths of the American economy, a problem that would be familiar to reformers of yore.” 13/17

Today, monopolization is a problem across finance: payments, bank size, the rise of the non-bank sector, asset managers, municipal bonds, investment banking services, credit scoring and so on. 12/17

In the 1930s, they also grappled with the serious problem that “Finance, when consolidated into large entities, tended to assert increasingly direct and malign control over the rest of the economy.” (That's why Congress later passed the Bank Holding Company Act.) 11/17

New Dealers ❤️ antimonopoly: “They saw that the financial collapse that had led to the Great Depression did not stem from the actions of a few bad apples but rather from systemically perverse incentives. Regulating a failed apparatus could hardly lead to better outcomes.” 10/17

That's exactly what happened. Now the banks are bigger, the business strategies more predatory, and all the tools Dodd-Frank created went unused, including by Obama & Biden administration regulators. 9/17

Sen. Ted Kaufman warned us: “Chastened regulators may try in the coming years to be harder on the megabanks. But even if they do, history has shown us that the tango will reach the end of the dance floor, and the big banks will execute the turn and lead again.” 8/17

Why did Dodd-Frank fail? “Its breadth obscured a fatal weakness … the law fortified the bureaucratic discretion to regulate rather than creating an industry obligation to restructure, which immediately tilted the playing field in Wall Street’s favor.” 7/17

Antimonopoly politics are promising: “If you fancy yourself a realist and scoff at the successes of the antimonopoly movement so far, try facing reality: It might not be bearing a ton of fruit right now, but this tree is growing and nurturing future champions.” 6/17

Warning: Various Project 2029s risk retreading Dodd-Frank, an approach that has already failed. Beware of new prescriptions that call for using technical fixes to our structural problems. Obama and Biden showed us even Dem administrations won’t use them. 5/17

Recall that the New Deal of the 1930s, coming after a similar financial crisis, succeeded where Dodd-Frank failed. “The New Dealers, by contrast, adopted a strategy that stood the test of time precisely because it embraced the antimonopoly spirit.” 4/17