Oct 22,2016) Economist Magazine they describe Putin’s  domestic policy to reduce competition to favor his oligarchs. They describe system he developed which Kirll Rogov, a Russian political economist describes as “soft legal constraints.” To quote from the Economist Magazine, “It involves writing the rules in such a way that to observe them is either prohibitively expensive or downright impossible to follow, then handing out licenses to break those rules.” Doesn’t this sound exactly like what has happened in our financial industry? The SEC and FINRA have made the rules (compliance) to run an independent brokerage firm as either prohibitively expensive or downright impossible to follow. In this way, they have eliminated the independent competition and have turned over the entire financial industry to the banks and large financial institutions. They allow these companies to break the rules and for the cost of a small fine as compared to the large profit that they made in breaking the rules. In this way the large financial institutions feed the SEC, that guards their monopoly. In my opinion, my firm, Birkelbach Investments Securities Inc., was just one of the firms taken out of business using SEC and FINRA “soft legal constraints” as a tool of the oligarchy. In my opinion, with Trump functioning without restraints, he will favor his buddies, causing the United States  to look more and more like Putin’s Russia and its economy, dominated by the privileged few 400 families (top tenth of 1%).