Between North Korean nukes and Trump's tweets, the American public hasn't been watching Wall Street. Like a good pickpocket, the idea is to distract you while they steal everything.

Except in this case, the police are telling you that they are powerless to stop the thieves.



The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has found a solution to its problem of chronic underfunding — it will let the industry do the investigating.

That’s not an overstatement. The head of the CFTC’s enforcement division will lay that framework out in a speech on Monday night, according to a draft received by the New York Times.

The thrust is that companies that self-report will receive a discount on their penalty of about 75%, and in what are called rare cases in the report, relief from penalties altogether.

Because Wall Street is so good at policing themselves.

It's not entirely the fault of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission - they only have a single board member, partly because no one wants to work for Trump.

While the Obama Administration was infamous for settling for fines instead of jail sentences for white-collar crimes, the Trump administration has decided that even imposing fines are too much.



Penalties imposed during the first half of 2017 on Wall Street firms by their regulators — the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra) — plunged 65% compared to the same period in 2016.

...The Journal explains:

SEC Chairman Jay Clayton, who took over in May, has expressed concern about the size of corporate penalties the SEC has levied in recent years, saying they hurt shareholders and it would be better to punish guilty individuals.

Don't get the idea that this is limited to the CFTC. The regulators, at the direction of the Trump Administration, have taken a hatchet to the already weak Dodd-Frank regulations.

Such as excessive compensation.



Several regulators have dropped pursuit of a long-running plan to restrict bonuses on Wall Street, as part of a wider effort to stop working on unfinished rules put in place after the financial crisis.

And the Volcker Rule.



Wall Street regulators have agreed to rewrite the Volcker Rule, according to three people familiar with the matter, moving to loosen industry-despised restrictions that were central to the U.S. response to the financial crisis.

It just a coincidence that four former Goldman Sachs executives were in top positions in the Trump administration: Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Steve Bannon, and Steven Mnuchin. The fifth, Anthony Scaramucci, didn’t last long.

Wall Street is still firing whistleblowers who have the audacity to point out their firm's lawbreaking, despite whistleblower protection statutes embedded in Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform.

What isn't as well known is that firing whistleblowers is a common practice with Wall Street regulators as well.



That Wall Street is unrepentant almost a decade after it caused the greatest financial crash since the Great Depression is a product of toothless regulation and crony regulators. Nothing underscores this point better than what happened to Carmen Segarra, a bank examiner for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, assigned to monitor Goldman Sachs. After Segarra gave Goldman a negative review, she was bullied inside the Fed to change her review. When she refused, she was fired according to her court filing. But before she was fired, Segarra made a trip to the Spy Store, bought a tiny microphone, and went about taping 46 hours of conversations inside of two of the most powerful Wall Street institutions – Goldman Sachs and the New York Fed.

Why have you not heard about this? Well, the financial news media is as captured as the regulators.

What we've seen instead are ridiculous headlines like these:

“How Washington beat Wall Street”

“Stop Bashing Wall Street. Times Have Changed.”

“Why Democrats Need Wall Street.”

So is all of this a problem? Uh, yes.



None of the regulatory gaps that allowed this to happen have been rectified. The biggest Wall Street banks have grown even bigger and remain too-big-to-fail; Wall Street is still paying the rating agencies for their Triple-A ratings; highly speculative Wall Street firms are still allowed to hold trillions of dollars in taxpayer-backstopped insured deposits in the commercial banks that they are allowed to own under a Byzantine bank-holding company structure with thousands of far-flung subsidiaries around the globe; and a handful of Wall Street banks continue to house trillions of dollars of derivatives inside their insured depository banks – something the public was assured would end under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation.