Here's something from The New York Times that everybody missed. Over at Treasury, where jet-set dweeb Steve Mnuchin presides—and have I pointed out that putting a foreclosure merchant in charge of the nation's economy was A-OK with Bob Corker?—they are planning to take a hatchet and two power-saws to the Dodd-Frank financial regulations which were, you may recall, passed in response to the fact that the financial services industry nearly blew up the world.

(Here's Man Of Great Principle Bob Corker, with all the customary flummery about small business, expressing relief that his donor...er...the economy will be freed from the requirement that money managers not lie to their customers.)

Some of the proposed overhauls would do away with a requirement for companies to divulge the pay ratio of chief executives to workers, streamline derivatives rules, and give companies more access to capital and investors more places to put their money. The ideas were welcomed on Wall Street, where banks complain that Dodd-Frank rules have needlessly hobbled growth. But they attracted skepticism from consumer groups and others, who consider the suggestions a dangerous relaxation of checks against a cavalier financial system.



The report offers a guide to agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which police activity relating to stocks, bonds and derivatives. But the detailed 220-page document also serves as a gauge of the administration’s attitude toward Wall Street — namely, that market restraints should be loosened.

Mnuchin got rich as a vulture capitalist. However, unlike most respectable vultures, who feed only on carrion killed by other means, vulture capitalists like Mnuchin and his friends kill their own food. As a nation, we learn nothing in this regard, as we discovered the other day when Dave Dayen revealed how J.P. Morgan finessed even the piddling fine that had been levied against the company for the last time it had helped destroy people's lives. They are setting the rubes up for a fall one more time and, I might mention, that Bob Corker is doing nothing to stop it.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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