Obama and Regulation Reform

This may be going out on a limb, but I love to put 2+2 together to see that it makes 4. Three disparate events.

One, new Chief of Staff Bill Daley is considered to be business friendly. Obama knows he can’t win an election based on his first two years of policy-so he is beginning his tack to the center. He is counting on people forgetting the awful solutions he proposed, and he is counting on the mainstream press to be a reliable megaphone.

That’s the thing about statists, they underestimate the intelligence of their subjects.

Daley has been in business, but most of all he knows how to work the federal bureaucracy to get things done. Obama is stymied in Congress. If the Democrats that are up for election in 2012 aren’t running scared then they are ostriches. Two of them stepped down yesterday, and surely more will follow.

Second point. Obama penned an editorial in the Wall Street Journal on regulatory reform. He says his administration will try to streamline regulation to make it a better business climate. Clinton tried the same strategy. Recall Al Gore on David Letterman smashing a government ashtray with a sledge hammer? It happened back in 1993 before Youtube.com. Obama is going to manipulate the regulatory system to make an end run around the Congress. He will do it under the shroud of helping business.

A tiger can’t change it’s stripes. He will still try and spread the wealth around.

Then there is this.  The CFTC released its working group study on carbon markets.  Seems innocent right?  Until you think about Obama and the global warming crowd backdooring global warming legislation via the bureaucracy.  Wouldn’t it be interesting to do it via the CFTC, an exchange regulator, and not the EPA where everyone would be looking?

Recall the ICE exchange bought the Chicago Climate Exchange(CCX) for just over $600 million.  ICE has done nothing but lose money on that investment.  Carbon trading is all but defunct.  CCX never had meaningful volume to begin with.  No one can really figure out why ICE paid what they did for it.  Al Gore had a meaningful investment in the CCX.  Strategically, it was sort of a fit since ICE performed some clearing for CCX, and as an energy based exchange, ICE has exposure to a carbon market.

That investment of 600m is an anchor though if there isn’t a carbon market.  Without global warming legislation, pollution legislation, there won’t be a carbon market.

In his editorial on regulation reform, Obama used the straw man of saccharine.  How many years did it take two government agencies to figure out that saccharine wasn’t hazardous waste?  Politicians on both sides of the aisle love to set up straw men and beat them to death, and this is certainly an Obama scarecrow.  Absent from his regulatory review, healthcare and financial regulation!  This regulatory reform tac is purely political, not genuine.

Will be interesting to see if 2+2=4, or as my friend at Notes From the Undergound says, 2+2=5.

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