, Columnist
Europe's New Volcker Rule Enrages Everyone Equally
Well really it's a Barnier Rule. And it's not exactly the law yet. But Volcker had a long limbo too.
Today the European Commission proposed rules that would prohibit systemically important European banks from engaging in proprietary trading. It's part of a big glop of other rules designed to make those banks safer, and I confess I haven't read the whole glop, and in any case it hasn't been approved yet, so there's a European Volcker Rule only in the sense that there was a Volcker Rule in the U.S. for the like three years before the regulators actually wrote it.
Here you can read about how "Bank lobbyists reacted angrily" to the proposal, and how anti-bank lobbyists reacted with equal anger, and how the proposal's author, EU commissioner Michel Barnier, takes this equal and opposite anger as a good sign: