The Left’s new obfuscatory synonym for “dumb Americans.”

US securities regulators, under pressure to demonstrate they have a handle on potential risks in the asset-management industry, are about to crack down on the use of derivatives in certain funds sold to the public, worried that some products are too precarious for retail investors.

Because us dumb Americans are just too ignorant to make our own investment decisions. We need the Progressive Know Betters to tell us how we should make some investments, and to deny us access to other investments.

[U]nder pressure to demonstrate they have a handle on potential risks in the asset-management industry: this is actually the problem. The securities regulators, themselves, have no idea of the risks of derivatives. They showed this risk all through the Panic of 2008, and they’ve done nothing substantive to correct their failure.

If these regulators were serious about the precariousness of (some) derivatives, they’d require the chaining of them and the arithmetic underlying them to be made public so that all investors—institutional and dumb Americans retail alike—could make our own assessments. Without Big Government Know Better interference.