M&A

Anti-Wall Street sentiment makes for a good cover, but behind the scenes and rhetoric, legislators are working with the country's largest financial firms to fashion a new system that concentrates even more risk and reward at fewer banks.

And what's more, the underlying socialization of the system will guarantee the success of excess with the full faith and credit of taxpayers.

On Dec. 11, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009, which among other things, creates a consumer protection agency, strips the U.S. Federal Reserve of certain powers and subjects it to politicization, calls for big banks to finance a $150 billion bailout fund and gives the government power to break up or coddle financial firms as they see fit.

The Senate will try and reconcile the House bill with an earlier version of its own bill. Legislators are hoping to have a final bill ready sometime in early 2010.

But, in a testament to the power of Wall Street, what's on the table is what works for bankers and the Street. The resulting de-facto socialization of American banking is nothing more than Wall Street's secret agenda to eliminate competition, grow bigger profit engines and rely on the perception of a socialized system to support cheap funding.