LEGENDARY ENTREPRENEUR LAUNCHES CONCRETE PLAN TO HELP FIX GOVERNMENT
Co-Founder of Knight Financial Walter Raquet Outlines Plan in New Book
NEW YORK, (June 1, 2016) – Creating boards of directors of businesspeople to oversee government departments and rewarding whistleblowers who uncover and report fraud are two of the specific reforms being proposed in a groundbreaking new book: Government is Killing The Economy, by Walter Raquet, the co-founder of Knight Financial, which transformed Wall Street trading, and a whistleblower who uncovered one of the biggest financial frauds in history.
Raquet sees over-regulation and waste crippling American business, causing the middle class to stagnate and young people to lose hope. The American Dream is fading.
Central to his solution is the boards of directors, which would allow all Federal departments and agencies to be run like businesses, not necessarily to turn a profit, but to cut waste and unnecessary regulations. These boards would be made up of seasoned business executives and eminent industry experts, equally divided between Democrats and Republicans.
The book offers common sense thoughts, distilled from a 50-year career, on a cure for the tremendous negative economic impact of regulation and government mismanagement on the U.S. economy. The three biggest problems he sees are: Over-regulation as embodied by the 74,000 pages of regulations and commentary on them comprising the U.S. Tax Code; uncontrolled and unexamined government waste; and public and private fraud. All of this has resulted in the middle class not getting any wage increases for more than 15 years, and younger people losing hope that they can benefit as their parents did from America’s promise.
In addition to cutting harmful regulations, Raquet, who uncovered a massive fraud at Sentinel financial services company in the 1980s, says rewarding rather than punishing whistleblowers will stop a lot of ongoing illegality. “Unleashing the millions of whistleblowers is a key to stopping waste, fraud and abuse and save the American taxpayer billions of dollars a year,” Raquet writes. He says none of these recommendations are political. He’s sending a copy of his book to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, as well as members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.
Raquet is planning a campaign to offer his recommendations to the country he loves. Government is Killing The Economy is his first step.
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(Government is Killing the Economy will be available in print and Kindle edition at amazon.com; for Nook at barnesandnoble.com; and shortly at iBooks)
BACKGROUND ON WALTER RAQUET (“Rakay”)
Walter Raquet is a leader whose innovations and values have had a profound effect on American business.
Mr. Raquet uncovered the largest tax fraud ($1 billion) in the history of the United States and assisted the U.S. Treasury and the IRS in shutting it down. (1980)
He created the first sophisticated equity trading system, called COLT, which was used by the majority of the world’s trading firms. (1984)
In 1995, he co-founded Knight Financial, a company with $17 million in capital and 70 employees. In its fifth year, the company had EBITDA of $301 million, employed 1,400 people and its public value rose as high as $8 billion. (1995-1999)
Mr. Raquet during that period predicted that asinine regulation by Arthur Levitt, then the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, would gravely harm the capital markets. Levitt’s over-regulation caused the loss of 18 million jobs in the U.S. over a 15-year period.(1997)
At the age of 26, Walter Raquet was the corporate controller of the 10th largest Wall Street firm. Today, at the age of 71 he is guiding the CEO of a clean air and energy savings company (AtmosAir.com) to make that firm grow to a multi-billion-dollar enterprise in the next three years.