Author Archives: Yves Smith

Volcker Rule: The Devil’s in the Unimpressive Enforcement Details

If you managed to be late to the Volcker Rule party, you can learn a great deal of what you’d need to know via the revealing contrast between two reasonably detailed accounts, one at Huffington Post by Shahien Nasiripour, the other by Matt Levine at Bloomberg. If you didn’t know better, you’d wonder if they were talking about the same rule.

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Big Banks About to Start Booking Second Mortgage Losses They Can No Longer Extend and Pretend Away

Reuters has a new article, Insight: A new wave of U.S. mortgage trouble threatens, which is simultaneously informative and frustrating. It is informative in that it provides some good detail but it is frustrating in that it depicts a long-standing problem aided and abetted by regulators as new.

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Whistleblower Describes How Private Equity Firms Flagrantly Violate SEC Broker-Dealer Requirements

Last week, Crain’s Business Daily and Fortune reported that a whistleblower has provided the SEC with evidence of massive, ongoing violations of securities laws, specifically, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, by several unnamed private equity firms.

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