[flachsechs]

it's amazing how much the finance industry can get away with. like honest-to-goodness amazing.

it's really impressive how these people can have such a death-grip on society. honestly, i'm more curious than mad. how is such a thing even possible? i mean, wow.

[kolbe]

It's not "finance" per se. It's anyone granted a carte blanche privilege of some rent to exploit. This is almost always granted either directly or indirectly by the government.

How has finance made it possible? By getting the government to subsidize the industry for all existing entrants at the expense of people who may have better, more progressive ideas about how to manage the financial system. Also at the expense of people in general.

[Florin_Andrei]

The big moneybags are always above the law.

This seems to become one of the biggest problems of modern civilization. Until it's fixed, all sorts of issues like this, and bigger, will continue to occur.

[dbmikus]

Avoiding repercussions for bad security is pretty much consistent across all industries.

[Ascetik]

Because of our corrupt banking system and the politicians in bed with them.

[KirinDave]

Having been in that system, the reality is so much more bizarre than that.

The actual reality I observed is that the government inspectors and regulators are lawyers and older industry people who simply don't understand technology. Since the US government has limited technical expertise they rely on FIs to adhere to standards and propose self-regulatory measures.

[chaostheory]

The finance industry as a whole spends a few billion dollars on lobbying. They spend the most on lobbying compared to every other sector. imo this is one of the things the tech industry hasn't fully optimized yet

[aeorgnoieang]

Neither of your first two sentences seem to be true:

- [Lobbying Spending Database | OpenSecrets](https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2017&inde...)

And note that "Education" isn't spending that much less!

> imo this is one of the things the tech industry hasn't fully optimized yet

How would the tech industry "optimize" lobbying? Or even just lobbying by finance?

[chaostheory]

You're kind of right. I misread the decimal as a comma in $248,785,615.00. Pharma / Health is the next highest spending industry at around $144,778,982, about $100 million less than finance. Finance is the top lobby. Tech lobbying is at $68,403,203 which isn't even half of what finance officially spends on lobbying.

The OpenSecrets lobbying data also doesn't include lobbying money that isn't officially lobbying money. A lot of politicians, at least in the US - including state level legislators, have non-profit foundations with sketchy ledgers. With many of these foundations, little of the money dontated actually goes towards their publicly stated causes. Most of it is spent on miscellaneous expenses such as trips and dinners or on political ads.

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2015/02/09/politics-and-the-u...

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/08/03/how-end-polit...

https://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/06/12/12794/state-legis... - oversight doesn't usually happen when it's not public funds being directed into the non-profits

If you include the finance industry's donations to sketcy non-profits that are closely tied to politicians, then I'm guessing it would dwarf what we're seeing compared to just official lobbying money

Tech would 'optimize' not just by spending more, but also in offering benefits that finance can't offer such as better data for say elections as an example

[walrus1066]

Well, these guys are simply too big to fail. Equifax cannot go bust, otherwise loads of consumer credit (mortgages, car loans etc) would freeze up, causing huge harm to the economy.

The market likely knows this, hence the stable stock price.

[raisedbyninjas]

Genuine question, how are Equifax's services functionally different from the other credit bureaus? What is to stop the federal gov from shutting them down to protect national security forcing any business partners to move to the other providers.

[gaius]

Equifax cannot go bust, otherwise loads of consumer credit (mortgages, car loans etc) would freeze up

Nope - there are two others who will gladly take up the slack.

[walrus1066]

My company would be really hampered if Equifax went bust. We do use two other credit bureaus, but some functions depend on data only Equifax provides.

We also use the different bureaus together for cross checking, often one bureaus file will be out of date or have errors, while the other is fine. So we'd have a much harder job of calculating risk if one of the big bureaus went out of business, simply because we'd be losing a major data source that drives our business.

I am very sure this case applies to other financial institutions as well.