Democracy and Big Business

Banking CEOs find the time to ‘coach’ kids out of college who are going to write the legislation to reign in the financial industry:

Kicking off a two-day event designed to “help” legislative aides who will be writing the rules designed to rein in and reform Wall Street, the CEOs made it clear that they would be there “anytime” a young, confused congressional aide needed help understanding a complex topic.

“Call us, say we met in Washington,” said Richard Davis, chairman, president and CEO of U.S. Bancorp. “We’d love to help.”

In case we forget, greedy credit-rating agencies were at the epicentre of the financial collapse. Here is the US government fighting with consumer credit-rating agencies with ads mocking them after they could not do anything:

. . . Possin is the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against Experian that seeks to “stop the fraud and seek compensation for the tens of thousands of consumers deceived by Experian’s FreeCreditReport.com to the tune of millions of fraudulently obtained profits.”

The complaint notes that the Federal Trade Commission has repeatedly won settlements from Experian for its advertising, to no avail. “The fact that the government got involved a few years ago shows that this is consumer fraud,” said Balestriere. (The FTC ultimately started trying to fight back with parodies of the ads.)