Category Archives: Banking industry

Lynn Parramore: The Depressing Tale of How Greedy Financial Titans Crushed Innovation and Destroyed Our Economy

Whatever happened to innovation in America?

Why It’s Absurd that America Doesn’t Tax Wall Street’s Transactions

Yves here. The post below from Paul Buchheit makes a persuasive layperson’s case for a financial transactions tax. There is an equally sound case to be made from a financial markets viewpoint.

Bill Black: Conservatives and Libertarians Should Support the Return of Glass-Steagall

Yves here. Aside from the foursquare case that Professor Black makes for reinstituting Glass-Steagall, another important set of arguments came in 2009 from Andrew Haldane, director of financial stability at the Bank of England.

How Goldman Cost $5 Billion Manipulating Aluminum Inventories (and Copper is Up Next)

What sexual favors were exchanged so that the New York Times blunted the impact of an important, detailed investigative story on Goldman profiteering, this time in the aluminum market, by releasing it on a heat-addled summer Saturday?

China’s Most Famous Ghost City Busts

The Chinese government, as has been widely reported, is trying to cool growth, in large measure to take the hot air out of its shadow banking sector. But can it engineer its hoped-for soft landing?

Thomas Ferguson: Why Spitzer’s Return Terrifies Big Finance

Spitzer is the only major U.S. politician whose deeds, and not simply words, prove that he does not think corporate titans are too big to jail. And as New York City Comptroller, he’d have subpoena power.

Bill Black: What if Bernanke Had the Character to be Candid?

Yves here. I suspect NC readers can go even further will Bill Black’s question!

House Republican GSE Bill Would Codify MERS, Pre-Empt Private Property Rights

The top Republican on the House Financial Services Committee has tucked a provision into his mortgage finance reform bill that would create a privately held “National Mortgage Data Repository.” The repository would basically look like MERS, the bank-owned electronic database tracking mortgage transfer. The difference is that, while MERS’ activities have drawn legal challenges across the country, the National Mortgage Data Repository would have the force of statute to carry out the exact same behavior. According to the bill text, any document arising from this repository would be seen as presumptively legal, pre-empting state and federal laws on demonstrating the right to foreclose.

Banks Win Again: CFTC Caves, SEC Opens Door Wide Open to Fraud

I’m going to be brief, in part because the CFTC’s probable demonstration of lack of gumption is still in play, while the SEC’s was expected but nevertheless appalling. But the bottom line is that even though we seem some intermittent signs of the officialdom recognizing that big banks remain a menace to the health and well-being to the general public*, the measures to constrain them continue to be inadequate.

Yanis Varoufakis: Europe Resorts to Authoritarianism to Paper Over Banking and Austerity Failures

Yves here. Because the European slow-motion train wreck is turning out to be particularly slow, it’s almost become background noise in the US, almost a lesser version of the now two lost decades in Japan. But what is happing in Europe is less benign and less likely to be able to continue anywhere near that long.

The Fed (Sort of) Speaks, but is the Bond Market Really Listening?

Yves here. As has become typical of late, the markets reacted sharply to the release of the FOMC minutes on Wednesday and Bernanke’s remarks later. For a really good effort at parsing the minutes, see Fedwatcher Tim Duy. The one clear conclusion was how unclear the minutes were:

Wall Street and Unions Have Knives Out Against Spitzer’s NYC Comptroller Run

Nothing like the prospect of someone with a high profile and a track record of going toe to toe with powerful interests and rich enough not to be beholden to party machinery to bring out all sorts of hacks and score-settlers.

Banks Outbidding Private Equity Funds at Foreclosures, Believing They Can Beat Them at the Pump and Dump Game

It’s conventional to deem local journalism to be dead, but Josh Salman at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune has written well-researched investigative story on bank bidding at foreclosures in his neck of the woods, Big lenders bidding to keep homes, that has national implications.

David Dayen: A Revealing Episode in DC Groupthink

So this week I got an education in the mentality of “official” Washington.

Last week I was asked by a DC-based publication to give a comment on Corker-Warner, the flavor-of-the-month proposal to abolish Fannie and Freddie and reform mortgage finance. I basically take the same position as Yves on this issue: all of these GSE 2.0 plans assume a private label MBS market the way the proverbial economist on a desert island assumes a can opener.