Berlau on the President's Financial Proposals

(Originally posted on NRO-The Corner by my husband)

Listening to the president's Wall Street speech yesterday, you'd think that he had a powerful package of commonsense regulations aimed at ending abuses in Wall Street itself. Far from it. As my colleague John Berlau notes:

A closer look at many of the provisions of the regulatory package shows that more of the rules would not go after the culprits in the Wall Street crisis, but burden Main Street businesses that had nothing to do with the meltdown and indeed are leading the way back to growth. The causes of the crisis are complex, but I think folks would be hard pressed to argue that somehow the main culprits were the limited banking operations of Target Stores and Harley Davidson, discount stockbrokers and their customers, and venture capital firms who fund technology startup. Yet these are the business that could be most adversely affected by the Obama administration's "regulatory reforms" now being debated in Congress.

John takes the president's proposals apart, kicks them around a bit, and then stomps on what's left over at Openmarket.