More Advice For the Wall Street Protesters

POSTED: October 13, 11:48 AM ET | By Julian Brookes

Over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum gets behind Matt Taibbi's advice to the Occupy Wall Street protesters – to work up "a short but powerful list of demands" aimed at really cleaning up Wall Street – and throws in a few suggestions of his own:

If it were up to me I'd slot in some kind of leverage requirement in place of the lobbying item, but I recognize that this wouldn't exactly be a populist crowd pleaser. So if that doesn't work, how about banning credit default swaps? Despite the best efforts of several people to convince me otherwise, I remain skeptical that they're a net positive for the financial system. I don't know how practical an outright ban would be unless we got the rest of the world to go along, but it's probably a little bit better as a rallying cry than "Hey hey, ho ho, risk-based capital has got to go, and it should be replaced by a simple leverage ratio of at least 10%."

Meanwhile, on Letterman last night Bill Clinton said the protesters need to start focusing on specific politcal solutions to boost the economy: "I think that, on balance, this [protest] can be a positive thing, but they’re going to have to transfer their energies at some point to making some specific suggestions ... to put the country back to work," he said. A good place to start: Obama's jobs plan. "They need to be for something specific and not just against something because if you’re just against something, somebody else will fill the vacuum you create," he said.