The KGB Oracle Forums General Public Discussion (SPECIAL ACCESS) KGB Political Debate Central regulation nation

That is exactly what he is saying. Intentionally misrepresenting an investment is fraud.

The various govt entities already had the power to put a stop to it, but did not.

The Obama administration has decided not to prosecute anyone politically connected in connection with the collapse. However, the Obama allies have this daydream that if only "more" regulations were in place, that the govt would somehow not only detect but have the political will to halt the next big scheme concocted by super wealthy super connected Wall St types.

The irony of course is that the same types who masterminded this whole situation arent much bothered by additional regulation - their legions of lawyers lobbyists and fixers make an extremely good living navigating the legal and regulatory waters. Its the smaller "not too big to fail" entities in the industry that really get hammered.

Here is an example to help you demonstrate my point.

Lets say we have a self-regulating "games for kids" lobby. It is bunch of gaming companies getting together and setting rules for making "games for kids". Few large companies get disproportionally large influence on this regulation.

Now these large companies turn around and stick bunch of addictive gambling into these games under disguise of micro-transactions and get rich off it.

Can you sue them? Not if they control self-regulatory body, they write their own "rules". Unless government steps in and make such practice illegal, they can continue doing it.

Kind of the same thing happened with these derivative securities - they were new enough that there wasn't any regulation in place, aside of self-regulation that was deliberately defanged by involved parties.

You are really mistaken in assuming that corporations would ever act in responsible manner unless they absolutely have to. Less regulations always means less responsiblitiy and this is exactly why shady corporations (see Koch Brothers) love to bankroll "deregulation" astroturfing.

There is no reason derivatives should be illegal. What happened was, sub-prime mortgages, aka mortgages to people who couldnt afford to pay them were packed into securities that *were labelled as AAA* by the rating agencies. In other words, those securities based on sub-prime US borrowers got a higher credit rating that *most first world governments*.

In other words, it was *fraud*.

Securitizing an investment and selling shares shouldn't be illegal. Misrepresenting those securities as something they are not however, has been illegal for a long long time.

If those securities had gotten the DDD rating they deserved, the market would never have picked them up.

In actuality the nuances get a bit deeper as to the hows and whys it happened... and the role a few corrupt people at Freddie and Fannie played in underwriting large segments of subprimes, thereby giving the impression that they were govt-back (which was partially the reason for the AAA credit rating) and many many other aspects have not been covered.

If someone wants to propose, individually, a single regulation or law along with method of enforcement... then sure, individual proposals can be evaluated on their own merit.

But adding regulation willy-nilly usually has unintended consequences.

It wasn't fraud according to the letter of the law. Why? Because there is no regulation/oversight into generating bond ratings, so they can just shrug and say "we tried our best" and move on. AFAIK, you STILL can label junk bonds AAA all day long and not go to jail over it.

System is suppose to be operating on reputation - you label things accurately, because your company's reputation is on the line, but it all fails when massive collusion happens and every rating agency/firm does it.

Read following on Slashdot:



Clearly, we need to deregulate even more, because otherwise we might be in danger of treating employees in humane ways.

Google’s restricting of anti-Muslim video shows role of Web firms as free-speech arbiters.

More reasons we are over-regulated! Who needs free-speech, after all private corporations control nearly all communication medium these days, lets just trust them to do the right thing and respect our rights?

Google servers are privately owned. They can show or not show what they want.

I hope you are not seriously thinking that more random regulation will somehow protect free speech... if anything the opposite occurs.

If you ever actually argued for some sensible regulation, you might get somewhere. Arguing the general principle of giving unaccountable bureaucrats more ways to target us and destroy our businesses so they can justify even larger budgets for themselves will never get you very far with rational people.

So what happens when medium for all speech is privately owned? We just give up on free speech?

Obviously, I disagree with you. Internet was built with government subsidies, many technologies used in Google (including ranking) are/were developed while doing government-sponsored research.

We urgently need regulation/laws that equivalent for Internet neutrality but only for speech.

What do you mean speech neutrality laws?

That sounds pretty damn scary to be honest.

And if you bought into Net Nuetrality- (which was just an underhanded power play for the ultra-large players to use govt as a means to squash their smaller competitors )- then your whole image as a progressive is at stake..

Also... methods of propagating speech have pretty much always been mostly privately owned... in a society where the govt isnt clamping down on speech, the free market does just fine.

Seriously, its within the means of even poor people in the USA to set up a website and stream their own video. Shitty films intended to piss people can be made and aired to your hearts content, even if Big Brother isnt standing over Googles shoulder making them waste bandwidth on it.

I 100% support Net Neutrality and I am surprised you haven't considered what the alternative would look like.

What do I mean? Well consider that most of communications, including political speech, is done online. Accessed via information aggregators like google, tweeter, facebook and so on. All of these are private companies. Under existing laws nothing stopping them from squashing and and all speech they don't like. Just because they rarely do it now, doesn't mean they won't abuse it at some point in the future.


Example: All major search engines (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google) get together and decide they don't like Republican party. All mentions and references of GOP disappear from any and all searches. Such move won't be illegal under current set of laws, because they are private companies.