Matt Levine, Columnist

Now There Is a Volcker Rule

I'm a pretty big whiner about the Volcker Rule but I think the final draft is pretty good, considering. There's a lot of "don't be dumb" type stuff, which I guess is better than "be dumb" type stuff.

December 10, 2013 at 6:27 PM UTC

By Matt Levine

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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So here is the Volcker rule,1and I think it's pretty good, all things considered.2The regulators had a hard job. Congress told them to write a rule saying:

Banning proprietary trading is sort of dumb, but it's not the end of the world. On the other hand distinguishing prop trading from "market making" and "hedging" is very difficult, and Congress didn't really attempt it. It's also important: You want banks to be able to hedge their risks and make markets.4(Or, I do, anyway, and Congress did.) So most of what the regulators have been doing for the last three years and change is trying to figure out how to do that.