Breaking: Banks May Actually Just Pretend Publicly To Be Playing By New Rules, Proceed To Do Whatever They Damn Well Please
While Wall Street publicly is dismantling its dedicated proprietary trading desks, some veterans of the Street are skeptical that the banks will really stop trading with their own money. They say banks could continue making house bets by disguising proprietary trading as making markets for clients. House bets, when they are mixed with client trades, are more difficult for regulators to detect. "To me, it is all smoke and mirrors," one former Goldman managing director said. "The truth is that most of the position-taking occurs at the market-making level." [Reuters]