Turning Wall Street ?

US President Barack Obama has unveiled a sweeping series of measures aimed at checking the behaviour of banks and creating pressures against high risk financial transactions and deals. The proposals which are touted as the biggest regulatory crackdown on banks since the 1930s, include limitations on the size of institutions and barring the most cavalier trading practices.

According to media reports, Obama stated “We should no longer allow banks to stray too far from their central mission of serving their customers,” “My resolve to reform the system is only strengthened when I see record profits at some of the very firms claiming that they cannot lend more to small business, cannot keep credit card rates low and cannot refund taxpayers for the bailout. If these folks want a fight, it’s a fight I’m ready to have. Never again will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is too big to fail.”

Obama stated that Wall Street banks must: halt “proprietary trading”, where banks risk huge sums predicting the outcome of future moves in the price of commodities such as oil; operate more cautiously and have more available funds; not become too large by limiting the amount of ordinary banking business they can undertake.

Wall Street has certainly demonstrated the degree of risk for the global community when an unfettered market is allowed to trade with unfettered greed, however Obama faces considerable barriers to effecting change needed in the World's largest capital markets. Risky deals and large executive remuneration has been the practice for many years and turning around such a culture, which also influences the rest of the international finance community, is a mammoth almost impossible task.

A War without End - the Taliban and Afghanistan

The war in Afghanistan shows little sign of resolution and the strike by the Taliban through a bombing against a CIA operation highlights the capacity of the group to strike back at will. The loss of seven CIA agents who were killed in the attack in Khost province has brought into the focus the clandestine and difficult war being fought by America’s intelligence agencies against the Taliban and al-Qaeda  in the wild border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Operating bases such as Forward Operating Base Chapman, are the main edge of American military and intelligence counter-terrorism operations in the tribal belt and have the objective of hunting down senior figures in al-Qaeda and their allies, the Taliban, and eliminating them. While the CIA’s main strike weapons are the remote drones which fly high over the border areas 24 hours a day, watching and listening to telephone networks, human intelligence is far harder to acquire yet absolutely essential for effective strikes. But gaining such vital and prized information among remote communities  is diffcult and dangerous given these commmunities are suspicious of any outsider and particualrly foreigners. The potential for inflitration and counter-strikes is very high which was demonstrated all too effectively this week.