Menace to Savings and Small Businesses

by Chidem Kurdas

As the old adage goes, be careful what you ask for, you might just get it. After the 2008 crisis it became fashionable to complain that too much trading is going on. There were calls in this and other countries to restrict financial transactions. And it happened. One example is the rule named after Paul Volcker in the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, banning depository banks’ trading on their own accounts (and also forbidding them from holding significant hedge fund or private equity interests).

Regulators are still in the process of determining how to implement the Volcker rule but the potential impact is already discernible. Likely victims include millions of Americans who save for their retirement and smaller companies that need to borrow money.

Politics of Healthcare Rationing

by Chidem Kurdas

The Obama administration’s remake of the US healthcare system stands on three legs. It makes the purchase of insurance compulsory. It doles out new entitlements via expanded Medicaid, subsidies and certain benefit mandates. And it promises to control the growth of medical costs. The title of the 2010 law, the Affordable Care Act, highlights the cost containment feature and Paul Krugman, for instance, has repeatedly cited a Congressional Budget Office prediction that the changes would reduce the federal budget deficit by keeping down costs.

Now we have more information as to how this supposed cost containment works.

Revolution on Wall Street?

by Chidem Kurdas

Protestors have “occupied” a square near Wall Street for weeks. Hundreds of them were arrested, some 700 while blocking the Brooklyn Bridge. The movement may be spreading to other American cities. At least one demonstrator says: “This is a revolution.”

They complain of joblessness and the inequities of global capitalism, though the sources of their distress vary widely, from having to pay back student loans to the depredations of the internal combustion engine. At this point their immediate, tangible adversary appears to be the New York Police Department. It is easy to make fun of disaffected middle-class kids with Apple computers camping out in Downtown Manhattan. They bask in media limelight while taunting working-class cops. Still, we should try to understand the matter.