You can almost hear the inertia – it’s like the grinding of heavy, rusty machinery.
“We don’t want to change and we’re not going to,” it says. “You lot can try but we’re not budging till we have to. And we know you haven’t got the energy to shift us.”
The big beasts of Wall Street are probably right. Nothing in the response to the financial crisis so far suggests the political establishment will have the guts and drive to reform finance in a way that really bites.
But Senator Blanche Lincoln at least tried – for all the good it did her. The Obama administration, Treasury and others have left her to hang in the wind.
Why? Lincoln’s proposal to make banks house their derivatives dealing desks in separately capitalised entities is modest enough. Like the Volcker Rule, it is a step in the right direction,...