Oligarchs hate that financial transactions tax, and they have senior administration officials in high places to protect their wealth from any tax, no matter how small.

Sen. Charles Schumer, in addition to smack-talking John Boehner on the debt limit, came out with two policy ideas over the weekend, one abominable and one that has quite a bit of merit. See if you can guess which one got more attention.

The SEC-CFTC report on the flash crash is out. Nothing to see here, just business as usual in the securities markets. Somehow that isn’t reassuring.

The market data analysis firm Nanex offers a convincing explanation of the Flash Crash of May 6, 2010. It identifies a troubling practice of computer trading that may be more serious than one crash.

I don’t want to say this was completely a technical glitch – even with that the market went down 350 points, mostly on European debt fears. But in a sense, what we saw yesterday does argue for stronger regulation of the financial sector. Too much trading is on auto-pilot, too much is invested in the sophistication of a computer program rather than the smooth flow of capital and judging the fundamentals of a company’s product. It’s like a casino populated by robots and automatic black jack machines. And as we saw, that has the potential to be dangerous.