Mirabile Dictu! Someone (Bankruptcy Trustee Freeh) Finally Sues Jon Corzine Over MF Global
The great unwashed public might get to enjoy a bit of theater.
Read more...Category Archives: Banana republic
Fierce Anti Bank Music Video by Animal Kingdom (NSFW)
Lambert and other readers old enough to remember the 1960s, when protest ballads of various sorts were an important part of both the civil rights movement and the opposition to the war in Vietnam, have wondered at the absence of anti-bank, anti-autocratic songs.
Below is one with a suitably pointed video taking aim squarely at predatory financiers.
Read more...Jeffrey Sachs Calls Out Wall Street Criminality and Pathological Greed
One of the things that Matt Stoller has stressed that the possibility of reform is remote until breaks within the elites take place.
Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia professor and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia, is a controversial figure for his neoliberal stance on macroeconomics and his role in promoting the use of “shock therapy” in emerging economies. But it is also important to recognize that criticism from a connected, respected insider has more significance than that of someone like Bill Black, who has made a career of taking on bank fraud but has never reached a top policy-making level.
This talk is blistering at several points.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Greek Banksters in Action – On the Latest Twist in the Story of Mafia-Style Terror Spreading Through the Greek Polity
Yves here. When high level bank and government dealings start resembling a John Grisham novel, it’s a sign that the rule of law is breaking down in a serious way. Given that the Troika’s plan for Greece is to break it on the rack, this sort of criminality isn’t a surprise. But the troubling bit is that if you reset this story in the US, I doubt anyone would find it implausible.
Read more...Independent Foreclosure Review Fiasco: OCC and Fed Decided Not to Find Harm
The last few days have had more and more ugly revelations emerge about the botched OCC and Fed Independent Foreclosure Review settlement, with some particularly important ones coming out of the hearings in Robert Menendez’s Senate Banking subcommittee today.
Read more...War on Whistleblowers: How the Obama Administration Destroyed Thomas Drake For Exposing Government Waste
By Marcy Wheeler. Cross posted from Alternet
When Thomas Drake, then an official at the National Security Agency, realized that the agency’s decision to shut down an internal data analysis program and instead outsource the project to a private contractor provided the government with less effective analysis at much higher cost, he tried to do something about it. Drake’s decision to join three other whistleblowers in asking the agency’s inspector general to investigate ultimately made him the target of a leak investigation that tore his life apart.
Read more...Vice Chairman of Chinese Accounting Association Warns Chinese Local Debt Could Create Bigger Crisis than US Housing Implosion
More Washington Sleaze: Lobbyist Tip Stoked Health Care Stock Jump
Yesterday, we featured an important article by Noam Scheiber on how Obama insiders cash out on their connections once they leave the fold. Today, in the Wall Street Journal, we read of the Congressional version in terms of how a tip by a lobbyist (and former Congressional aide) connected to an investment research firm led to a Congressional decision being leaked to investors before it was announced officially.
Read more...Linchpin Pro-Austerity Paper Rife with Errors; Recomputed Results Show No Growth Hit from High Government Debt
There appears to be no intellectually honest defense of austerity left standing.
Read more...Obama: The Buckraking Starts Here
It has become depressingly normal to hear of senior Administration officials going immediately for the golden ring when they leave public service. But for every Mary Shapiro joining Promontory and Lanny Breuer returning to Covington & Burling for $4 million a year, there are even more operatives at similar or lower levels who make a very juicy return on their association with Obama but don’t get the same level of attention in the mainstream media.
Norm Scheiber, in a must-read article in The New Republic, “Get Rich or Deny Trying:
How to make millions off Obama,” chronicles how this process works. It’s even uglier than you might imagine.
Here’s How the Foreclosure Reviews Could Have Been Done Much Faster and Cheaper
Yves here. The OCC made the not-surprising confession in Senate hearings last week that if it had to do them all over again, it would have handled them differently.
On the assumption that the OCC is sincere in its repentance, Michael Olenick offers one way to have executed the reviews at vastly lower cost than the botched process that resulted.
Read more...Foreclosure Review Hearings Show It’s Time to Burn Down the OCC
There has already been a lot of good commentary on the Senate hearings on the misnamed Independent Foreclosure Reviews, notably by Pam Martens. I’ve finally gotten a transcript (it will be going up shortly at Corrente) which helps in reviewing it more carefully. Since Part 2 of the hearings take place this week, I’ll focus on some key issues that haven’t gotten the attention they warrant.
Read more...Obama Social Security Reform Ignores Data on Actual Living Standards of Seniors
This Real News Network segment does a very nice, compact job of explaining why chained CPI is such a disastrously bad policy for older Americans. I’m featuring it with the hope that it might prove useful in educating friends and family members who might not be up to speed on this issue.
Read more...Michael Hudson on Obama’s “Catfood” Social Security Reform
Michael Hudson, in a Real News Network interview, puts paid some of the key ideas used to sell catfood futures, um, Social Security and Medicare cuts, such as if we don’t Do Something, interest on government bonds will eat the economy. He also gives a good explanation of what “chained CPI” is really all about.
Read more...Banks Resorting to Old Tricks to Reduce Capital Levels
Wow, did I miss it? Didn’t we have a crisis just a bit over four years ago? And wasn’t one of the big drivers the fact that banks were overlevered and took on too much risk?
Well, not only do we seem to be rerunning that playbook, banks are using strategies right under regulators’s eyes last time around to create phony capital. Worse, are pulling the exact same tricks they did last time around. Worse, regulators seem to be doing nothing to stop it.
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