Levitt Rejects Obama's Ideas

In an op-ed piece in the Financial Times, the man who served as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the Clinton administration, Arthur Levitt, pushes back against President Obama's two newest proposals to tax and regulate what the president calls "fat cat" bankers. Writes Mr. Levitt, "While I applaud the president's heightened interest in financial regulatory reform, both ideas have flaws: the bank tax is unfair and will probably be no more effective than the UK bonus tax, while the ban on proprietary trading would have virtually no impact on the risk-taking that caused most bank losses during the crisis." The FT identifies Mr. Levitt only as "former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission" without any disclosure of Mr. Levitt's work as a paid adviser to Goldman Sachs, which has a significant financial interest in how the Obama administration's proposals on the bank tax and proprietary trading turn out. The Wall Street Journal let Mr. Levitt get away with the same thing last summer.