Paul Woolley, who founded a center at the London School of Economics that studies "capital market dysfunctionality," put it even more bluntly to the New Yorker in 2010.

"Why on earth should finance be the biggest and most highly paid industry when it's just a utility, like sewage or gas?" he said.

Please read more here.

Aditya Chakrabortty of The Guardian writes:

"Credit rating agencies keep getting it wrong but still make billions. Why don't politicians stand up to them?.....

So, the agencies are neither accurate nor merely observers – yet they bully governments around the world and make billions doing so. The obvious solution would be to take this public service into public hands. Let's have a ratings agency run by the UN, funded by pooled contributions from both lenders and borrowers. It should be the only one to have preferential access to data from corporates and countries. Let's make the ratings business a utility, rather than a semi-cartel that intimidates elected politicians and rakes in excess profits. It's time to break up the bullying double-act."

Please read more here.

Karen Weise of Bloomberg writes:

"Big portions of the financial reform law are set to go into effect this year. Intended to make corporate practices transparent, the law itself is anything but. The government has yet to spell out the details of most of the 400 new regulations it imposes. A non-headache-inducing guide."

So Ms. Weise presents this nice graph to help us understand Dodd-Frank!

One of my blog readers was kind enough to forward this information to me - from the Occupy Wall Street financial reform working group.

Now if the U.S. can just reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act .....

A legal loophole in international brokerage regulations means that few, if any, clients of MF Global are likely to get their money back. Although details of the drama are still unfolding, it appears that MF Global and some of its Wall Street counterparts have been actively and aggressively circumventing U.S. securities rules at the expense (quite literally) of their clients.

Please read more here.

A derivatives trader colleague of mine emailed the following regarding the MF Global Ponzi scheme:

"...MF Global has scared the bejesus out of most futures traders..."

"...the government is an accomplice because of CFTC Rule 1.29. It should be purged but the reality is the western world is becoming a banana republic, the rule of law including contract law is having less and less relevance in people's lives because everybody is breaking the rules starting from the government."

Here is a nice analysis of CFTC Rule 1.29 - better known as "legal stealing."

As reported in today's Huffington Post, a handful of protesters at Occupy Wall Street are doing what the authors of a complex piece of financial legislation may have hoped no one would do. They are reading it.

The legislation is a draft of the so-called Volcker rule, a 298-page regulatory document that came out of last year's Dodd-Frank financial reform act. As originally proposed by Paul Volcker, then chairman of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, the rule was aimed in part at preventing federally backed banks from making risky trades that could ultimately cost taxpayers. But in its current form, the Volcker rule is long, dense and -- critics fear -- full of language that affords banks a lot of wiggle room.

Please read more here.

This fascinating article details how the anthropologist David Graeber helped transform "Occupy Wall Street" into a global protest movement.

You know what George Santayana said about people who forget the past. But we’re even dumber than that. We are doomed to repeat the past not because we have forgotten it but because we never learned the lessons to begin with.