Wall Street Masters of the Universe suddenly realize Democrats are Democrats
Wall Street is up in arms. Why? Because Joe Biden — the presidential candidate they supported, coming from the political party they have now supported for several elections in a row — is stabbing them in the back.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the financial industry is angrily pushing back against a bevy of expensive and expansive regulations issued by Biden's Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, Gary Gensler.
Among other things, the Biden SEC is attempting to force businesses to make irrelevant and unnecessary disclosures about climate change at great expense to their shareholders. Gensler is also trying to provide an illegal regulatory subsidy to the environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, movement by creating new standards for mutual funds and private equity firms that advertise themselves as ESG. The many objectionable changes are not based in any legislation passed by Congress.
Meanwhile, in its estimates of the impact on the industry, Gensler's SEC has been hilariously vague. In one case, the Wall Street Journal reports, the estimated cost for industries to bring their funds into compliance was between $50,000 and $500,000.
Big players on Wall Street, including the business group that represents the mutual fund industry, are now bombarding the agency with comment letters contesting the policies and the economic analyses on which they are based.
That's all well and good, but someone needs to tell a few hard truths to these Masters of the Universe. For example, "You idiots are paying the price for your own political choices."
Wall Street went woke and shifted its allegiance to the Democratic Party over a decade ago. In the last three elections, OpenSecrets found that the hedge fund , private equity , venture capital , and securities and investment industries all donated more money to Democratic candidates than to Republicans. And yet people are supposed to believe that only now the practitioners of finance have just figured out that the Democrats are Democrats?
Long ago, in a galaxy far away, there was a perception and a reality that Wall Street sided with Republicans. That perception and the reality behind it have both vanished in the last 30 years. There are many reasons for this, including the newfound attachment between corporate automatons and far-left cultural politics. Abortion, after all, improves the productivity of female employees. But the main reason is that no one hates a free market more than big business. Free markets result in competition, which drives down prices. Regulation, meanwhile, is often an ideal tool for wounding and maiming upstart companies that attempt to compete with established enterprises.
Faced with a choice between freer markets in which competitors might thrive and the powerful Democratic politicians who love to shake them down for contributions — thank you, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) — the robber barons found the latter preferable. And given the possible benefits of regulation, why shouldn't they?
Then again, there is a limit to everything. When ideologically fanatical Democrats rush in with genuinely useless and destructive proposals, things get out of hand. Suddenly, the traders and hedgies go crying to daddy Republican to bail them out. It's not that they care about the ordinary people who have entrusted them with their life's savings — if they had cared about those people, they would never have donated to Democrats in the first place.
If the finance professionals were the only ones suffering, then it would be just and fitting to let them lay in the bed they made. Just let Gensler peel the skin off their bones and boil them alive in cooking oil the way he intends to.
Unfortunately, however, things are not that easy. The robber barons hold in their hands the fate of millions of average people who played by the rules and diligently saved and invested for retirement. Those innocent people don't deserve to have their retirement controlled by Democrats and their control-freak tendencies. Then again, the robber barons' conduct merits the humiliation they are now receiving. May they suffer — but not so much that their retail investors are forced to suffer with them.
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