Brice Timmons

The Pivot Point Will Likely Be Election-Based

I'd like to see some support for this assertion. I'm going to avoid the more vs. less regulation argument. It's silly. We do not need *more* regulation. We need *effective* regulation. Reining in the debt:equity ratio would be smart. We've been operating with a 2.44% margin of error on heavily leveraged investments. Couple that with the post-Volker fed funds rates and you get overreach. That's absurd, and it ensures that credit markets will eventually contract sharply. Further, it virtually guarantees that the longer the period between contractions, the nastier they'll be.

Increasing burdens on directors and CEOs while simultaneously decreasing their ability to assert the business judgment rule as a defense in shareholder derivative suits seems like government trying to tell officers and directors how to run a company. That's heavy-handed and requires massive government oversight. Foolish.

We know from recent experience that Republicans will not regulate smart. We believe that the Democrats are as bad at business as they were in the 70's and 80's. Maybe they are, but maybe they can learn to regulate smart instead of regulating more.