The Flinchum File

Thoughtful Economic Analysis and Existential Opinions
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Senatorial Sense

Democrats are right:  The seeds of the next financial crisis are sown in the ashes of the last one.

Former Senator Hillary Clinton is right:  She wants to tax high-frequency trading and “dark pools’, making them more transparent and less profitable.  High-frequency trading poses a systemic risk to our financial system by overwhelming it with vast numbers of cancelled trades.  Dark pools are ways for investors buy and sell large quantities of stock in secret.  Think about that!

Senator Elizabeth Warren is right:  She wants more criminal prosecutions of white-collar professionals on Wall Street, who knowingly sell overly-risky investments to unsophisticated investors.  All I can say is . . . ditto!

There will be another financial crisis, I promise.  If you assume the 78 years between the Crashes of 1929 and 2007 means anything, we should not expect another in our lifetimes.  However, if we learned nothing else from Alvin Toffler’s classic Future Shock, we learned that the rate of change keeps increasing at an increasing rate, suggesting the 78 year interval means little if anything.

There is no reason to believe another financial crisis is in the near-future, but these senatorial reforms will help keep another financial crisis in the future.