If you watched the recent presidential debates or the Republican and Democratic conventions, you might have gotten the impression that the practices of Wall Street that led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression have been fixed. None of the candidates are talking about it. Aside from Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, politicians are noticeably silent on an issue that still poses a real risk to people’s economic futures: a financial system that is rigged against the ordinary citizen in favor of the banks — and allows the gains to be privatized to an elite few, even as the losses are socialized to everyone in America.
The truth is that the problem has not been fixed. Did you know that four years after the crisis, and more than two years after the passage of “landmark financial reform,” fewer than one-third of the new laws have been implemented and more than three-quarters of the required deadlines have been missed by the regulators? Did you know that the Wall Street lobby has spent more than $300 million trying to kill — or insert loopholes into — key rules that would ensure greater transparency in derivatives and forbid banks from betting against their own customers? Did you know that the nation’s five largest banks are even bigger than they were before the financial meltdown? Unfortunately, the politicians and regulators are buckling. There is a leaking dam, and what lawmakers and regulators have done so far is put a Band-Aid over it.
read more: http://business.time.com/2012/10/22/viewpoint-how-wall-street-rigs-the-game/