Why Wall Street Hasn't Changed--Part III (Return of the CDS Monster)

Bloomberg posted a story today that helps to explain why, as we wrote last week, big Wall Street banks like JPMorgan are desperate to slip in a couple of "technical amendments" to Dodd-Frank that could lay the groundwork for another financial catastrophe.
The lead of the story says it all: "A JPMorgan Chase & Co. trader of derivatives linked to the financial health of corporations has amassed positions so large that he’s driving price moves in the $10 trillion market, traders outside the firm said."
This is why is it is so very hard to be sympathetic to the lordly Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan, as he constantly whines about an overbearing Washington, and so hard to be anything less than angry at the Obama Treasury Department and others as they look the other way while Dodd-Frank, flawed as it is, is quietly undermined and evaded.
The trader featured in the Bloomberg story, Bruno Iksil, works out of London. No surprise, as we wrote in "Why Wall Street Hasn't Changed--Part II," the big banks are pushing hard to water down the Volcker Rule, which would prevent them taking risks with taxpayer-supplied federal guarantee money by banning large-scale proprietary trading. No surprise they are also fighting for passage of H.R. 3283, a bill that would allow them to evade capital and margin requirements by exempting their foreign affiliates--like the J.P. Morgan outfit in London. So, if it becomes law, a foreign affiliate could cut a swap or derivatives deal with a foreign affiliate of a U.S. corporation  with no one watching and no capital posted, just as if 2008 never happened. 
As the Bloomberg story notes, Dimon continues to bleat about these restraints, complaining that regulators "have proposed regulations of mind-numbing complexity.” In his annual letter to shareholders released this week, Dimon added hopefully that “even senior regulators now recognize that the current proposed rules are unworkable and will be impossible to implement.”
Welcome back to the year 2007, folks. Do we really want to go there?