Wall Streets huge political contributions are just "chump change" for them.

[Better Believe It]

Under Siege by the Lobbyists
By SIMON JOHNSON
May 27, 2010

Simon Johnson, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, is the co-author of “13 Bankers.”


The financial reform legislation heading into a Senate-House conference in June will, at best, do little to affect the incentives and beliefs at the heart of the largest banks on Wall Street. Serious attempts to strengthen the bill through amendment — such as Brown-Kaufman and Merkley-Levin — were either shot down on the floor of the Senate or, when their prospects seemed stronger, not allowed to come to a vote.

.... look at the lifetime contributions by the financial sector to some senators who voted against the Brown-Kaufman amendment, which would have imposed caps on both the size and leverage of the biggest banks — over $2 million per senator by this one partial count. Smaller contributions were made even to some senators who were then supporting the amendment.

Yet all this is actually very little money considering what is at stake. For a large firm actively engaged in derivatives trading, the stakes could easily be billions of dollars. For the big banks as a whole, the amount they will be allowed to earn (and pay themselves) as a result of the failure of these financial reforms is — conservatively speaking — in the tens of billions of dollars.

In terms of modern Wall Street — for top bankers and for hedge funds — the political contributions needed to make a difference are chump change.

And even if opponents of today’s biggest players on Wall Street were to become organized and raise money, presumably the big financial players could match that money and raise tens of millions of dollars more without breaking a sweat (particularly after the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court).

Read the full article at:

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/under-siege-by-the-lobbyists/?src=busln