I was more than a little surprised to see Met Life weighing in on the side of the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding the SEC’s move with Rule 151A to regulate some indexed annuities as securities.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been.  But truth is I can’t recall one instance in the long life of the Peanuts strip where Snoopy was shown biting someone.  This move of Met’s strikes me as being characteristic of quite another animal.  Bam! Before you know it the thing’s got its pointy sharp little teeth in your ankle and won’t let go.

Met’s amicus brief, wherein it supported the SEC, said “federal regulation of indexed annuities as securities is an appropriate exercise of the SEC’s rulemaking authority.”

Met notes in the brief that it does not sell equity indexed annuities, but does sell variable annuities, however.  Not selling EIAs, of course, gives it the perfect right to opine on their regulation, this being America after all.

Some investors may confuse EIAs with VAs, Met says.  ”Inadequate regulation of indexed annuities thus tarnishes the reputation of other annuity issuers, including MetLife and the insurance industry as a whole.” 

I don’t want to leave the impression that Met is being negative, however.  Further down in the brief it becomes clear that Met’s argument for SEC oversight of EIAs is really based on a feeling of sharing.  That is to say, since variable annuities are in part regulated by the SEC, then it is just not fair to deprive index annuities of enjoying the same privilege.

In other words, since my ox has been gored, so should yours.

I don’t know how long Met Life is wedded to Snoopy as its representative icon.  But if it ever wants to consider some other Peanuts characters, here are a couple of suggestions coming out of this amicus brief.

Good old Charlie Brown himself might be suitable since, in my opinion, Met really dropped the ball here.

But the character that probably best reflects this bit of opportunistic slamming is, of course, Lucy.  A far cry from Mother Met of days gone by, to be sure, but then nothing’s what it used to be.

Somehow, even after all we’ve been through, I still don’t connect Wall Street types with “getting religion,” as our forbears used to say.  Yet, here is Lloyd C. Blankfein, CEO of mighty Goldman Sachs, confounding expectations.

He gave a speech the other day to the Council of Institutional Investors that started with a mea culpa. “…much of the past year has been deeply humbling for my industry.  We held ourselves up as the experts, and the loss of public confidence from failing to live up to the expectations that we created will take years to rebuild. Worse, decisions on compensation and other actions taken and not taken, particularly at banks that rapidly lost a lot of shareholder value, look self-serving and greedy in hindsight.”

Perhaps this is the place to mention that Blankfein received comp valued at nearly $43 million in 2008, according to the New York Times.  This was down from almost $54 million in each of the two previous years.  I don’t know about you, but if I were sitting on that kind of comp I’d probably find it easier to own up to past mistakes. 

However, it’s also true that Goldman’s executive management team “elected not to receive a bonus in 2008, even though the firm produced a substantial profit,” as Blankfein stated. But this was due “in part” to the fact that “compensation continues to generate a lot of controversy and anger,” he said. “We recognize that having TARP money creates an important context for compensation.”

In any case what Blankfein did in his speech is state that evaluating the value a person creates and the compensation that goes with it “must be made on a multi-year basis to get a fuller picture of the effect of an individual’s decisions.”

He further said: “No one should get compensated with reference to only his or her own P&L. Compensation should encourage real teamwork and discourage selfish behavior, including excessive risk-taking, which hurts the longer-term interests of the firm and its shareholders.”

What about regulation? “For policymakers and regulators, it should be clear that self-regulation has its limits.  At the very least, fixing a system-wide problem, elevating standards or driving the industry to a collective response requires effective central regulation and the convening power of regulators.”

Then he added that “all pools of capital that depend on the smooth functioning of the financial system, and are large enough to be a burden on it in a crisis, should be subject to some degree of regulation.  Yes, that includes large hedge funds and private equity funds.”

This sounds good. Really good.  And I find myself wanting to believe Blankfein, in part because of his background.  He comes from Brooklyn, as do I, and grew up the Linden Houses, or what we call “the projects” in NYC.  His father was a postal worker.  He wasn’t born into wealth, in other words.  He worked his way up to it. 

It may just be wishful thinking on my part, but I’m hoping that because of his background he has an inkling of how furious all “the little people” are at the outsized compensation that Wall Street plutocrats awarded themselves and which was based on something as fluffy as meringue.

But despite the nice-sounding words, it’s still the action that counts, isn’t it? 

So, Lloyd, let’s consider this speech your first shot across the bow of your industry and its culture.  Now’s the time to bring the legendary firepower of Goldman behind these reforms that you enumerated and which you said are needed “to repair our financial system and reinvigorate our regulatory structure.” 

You’re from Brooklyn, so I know you know how to play hardball.  Go to it.

Yesterday was April 15 and the well-funded, well-orchestrated anti-tax people were out in force across the country, indulging in some 750 tea parties that harked backed to the days of the original Boston Tea Party.

Many of these folks were in Revolutionary War-era costumes, an attention to detail that obviously improves the verisimilitude of such events.

Unlike the original event in Boston, however, teabags abounded this year, since loose tea can be so inconvenient and messy.  I’m happy for these teabag-wearers’ sake that in most places (Philadelphia was an exception) rain held off.  There are, after all, few more uncomfortable things than having cold, wet teabags mar one’s period dress and stain the skin.

From one perspective you could view this as just one more special-interest group that needs to grow up.   

But then, America is not so much a melting pot of special interests as much as it is an uncomfortable stew of them.

In any case, with assiduous coverage from Fox News (who else?) and anti-tax exhortations from right-wing cable TV and radio personalities, this is a movement that hopes to catch fire, abetted by the usual but increasingly hysterical anti-government, anti-tax vitriol.

What, exactly, is it about taxes that has these people so frothed?  What programs, I’d like to ask them, would you be willing to give up that are funded by hated taxes?

Do you really want to go back to the days when there was no Social Security?  Or back to pre-Medicare days when a huge swath of the senior population lived in-or just above-poverty?

Are you really so upset about the defense budget?  If so, why don’t we hear many peeps from you about the habitual cost overruns in any number of weapons programs?  All of which waste your precious tax dollars.

Are you really so outraged by the interstate highway system?  The Children’s Health Insurance Program? Head Start?  Pell Grants?  The FDA, OSHA and the EPA?

You get the picture.

I’ve had it with the selfishness of this crew and their lack of caring and understanding about the interdependence of living creatures. It’s what we call society, folks. I’ve had it with the hypocrisy that rears its head when one of the tax breaks that they feed upon is targeted and they themselves go on the attack.

So here’s my suggestion for what you can do with those costumes which presumably you have put away until next year.  Take them out on October 31, that’s Halloween, and have a grand old party time scaring the living Darjeeling out of all the pre-teens you meet, kids who at least act their age.