• U.S. Treasury is engaged in a quiet war over Bitcoin & other digital currencies with state legislature lobbying groups like ALEC. Model legislation circulating now would exempt Buttcoin exchanges from customer-protection regulations because a form of cryptography opaque to most consumers and poorly understood by most regulators is all you need to keep finance people honest. The knock-on effect is that many financial institutions could just use Batcorn and evade regulation in whatever states adopt the legislation, probably all 50. (For anyone outside the U.S.: that country has a singularly stupid regime for commerce & finance regulation thanks to the role of the states in its written constitution & case law where each state technically polices its own turf, so to avoid complete economic meltdown a few lobbying groups write the exact same law to be passed by their house pets in every state, and then California usually adds that you have to recycle all associated soda cans and it's otherwise effectively a national legal regime.)
  
  
• In an ultra-short two-page decision, a U.S. federal judge has exempted Met-Life from Dodd-Frank risk protections. The decision is also notable because the head lawyer for the winning side is wretched dead Antonin Scalia's wretched child. The lack of detail in the ruling makes it judicially bulletproof and, together with a similar ruling for GE, likely means the end of most Dodd-Frank risk regulation.
  
  
• Because risk doesn't exist anymore and the market always goes up, U.S. pension funds and other big investors are pulling cash out of hedge funds en masse and pouring it into riskier investments. The appeal of a hedge fund is, naturally, hedging against downturns in the market, but the pension funds are all pissed that they didn't see big-money returns because hindsight is 20/20. Since those big investors include pensions for state workers and many states continue to slash their budgets, nothing can possibly go wrong here.
  
  
• To counter this movement, hedge funds are hoping to win big on rising oil prices; they took a ton of positions during February predicting large oil price increases and even more of them in March. Since the U.S. has depended in part on cheap oil to advance its economic & military agenda abroad in recent years and can manipulate supply at will, this is also a situation where everything will be great forever and nothing shady is going on behind the scenes.
  

drwhat posted:

p.s. the front page is stale, I think this could go there if you added some article excerpts in blockquotes for those of us too lazy to google around the registration, and explain wtf Dodd Frank is to people.

maybe. i'm writing something dumber for that purpose that became even dumber because i had too much job to finish it last weekend but will hopefully be done by the end of this one.