Europe's Existential Threat to U.S. Capital Markets

Requiring seven years to draft and weighing in (currently) at 1.4 million paragraphs of rules and regulations, Europe's new Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II will affect virtually every bank, mutual find, exchange, broker, pension fund, retail investor and high frequency trader that does business in Europe. In other words, almost every financial services company in the America. The European Union's social engineers will try to regulate virtually every aspect of the financial markets, covering everything from maintaining taped conversations of securities orders to regulatory filings for transactions that can stretch to more than 65 separate fields.