Mr. BigDog Goes to Washington

Now that healthcare reform has passed, seems like the next big legislative issue affecting the markets will be financial industry reform. This video article from The Wall Street Journal is a good summary of where that initiative's at now and what might be included in the bill sponsored by Christopher Dodd (D-CT).

I'm a fan of regulating those areas of financial services where regulation has been lax and demonstrably contributed to our recent financial woes. Mortgage brokers and their related markets particularly come to mind here, as do little-understood instruments like credit-default swaps that caused the wider economy so much pain of late. Clearly we need to work to ensure the conditions that led to the subprime bubble and almost toppled the whole economy don't recur. That's a top priority for everyone.

What I'm NOT for is the so-called Trader Tax, a per-transaction tax that might get tacked to every sale or purchase of stocks, options or futures. This tax isn't currently part of the Dodd bill, but it's recurred enough times in discussions that it's not impossible that the topic will re-emerge yet again.

As I explained in a recent post, we think it's a misguided tax for one reason: you can’t easily separate Wall Street from Main Street anymore. The proposed tax seeks to penalize “fat cat” Wall Street firms whose risky speculations jeopardized the larger U.S. economy, but chances are it'll simply get passed along to America's 20 million Main Street investors who are already struggling against myriad obstacles to meet their basic financial goals.

We feel so strongly about this matter, in fact, that I traveled to Washington D.C. with my colleague Rich Hagen to meet with our representatives and get our views heard. Together we visited the offices of Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT), Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), Senator Kay Hagen (D-NC), Senator George LeMieux (R-FL) and Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL), as well as House Representative Ron Klein (D-FL). Rich snapped a photo of me (above) as we made the rounds.

In some cases we met with the officials themselves, in other cases we met with senior staffers, but in all cases we were impressed at the time and attention these folks gave to the impending legislation and the thoroughness of our discussions. It was invigorating to take an active stance in democracy and represent our business and our customers this way - a first-time experience for both Rich and me.

It's great to know we've made contact with our representatives and can take further action if this tax re-appears in the financial-reform discussions. Will keep you posted, for sure!

P.S. if you're bugged by the media partisanship that seems so rife these days, you'll enjoy this fun detail: without exception, all the Democrats we visited had MSNBC running in their offices, while all the Republicans were watching Fox News. . The one legislator we visited known to be a “moderate”, Senator Nelson, had CNN on the tube. You gotta wonder: what would happen if they all switched the channels for a day or two?


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