Bill Black: How Elite Economic Hucksters Drive America’s Biggest Fraud Epidemics
Bill Black describes the spurious efforts to justify America’s recent fraudfests.
Read more...Category Archives: Banking industry
The Stealth Problem of Predatory Mortgage Modifications
Warning: mortgage modifications can be yet another exercise in bank predation.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Mixed Messages from the IMF
Yves here. Note how the need to pretend Deutsche Bank is not undercapitalized, mentioned in passing in this post, is playing into policy.
An interview by Yanis Varoufakis, Professor of Economics at the University of Athens, with Tomas Hirst of Pieria. Cross posted from Yanis Varoufakis’ blog.
Read more...Sasha Breger: How Big Finance is Eating the World’s Lunch Agricultural Wealth
If you hear a kind of whooshing, rushing noise, don’t worry—it’s not US jobs moving to China. Today’s great sucking sound is the sound of agricultural wealth being siphoned off into the global financial system.
Read more...Bill Black: How Dare DOJ Insult HSBC’s Crooks as Less “Professional” than Liberty Reserve’s Crooks?
By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Standard Chartered and HSBC’s leaders must be doubly humiliated by the description by Mythili Raman, the acting head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Criminal Division, of Liberty Reserve’s money laundering operation. UK laws are, of course, very congenial to those suing for libel and I am sure that these banking titans are meeting with their solicitors to demand a retraction and apology from Raman.
Read more...OCC Probe of JP Morgan Debt Collection Abuses Will Show if Agency Can Be Reformed
As readers probably know all too well, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has long been the most cronyistic of all bank regulators. So the default assumption when it cranks up an investigation is to assume that it’s just a window-dressing exercise or worse, a stealth bailout of some sort.
Yet the Washington Post tells us that the OCC is widening an investigation into debt collection, where alleged robosigner JP Morgan is the sinner-in-chief. What gives?
Read more...Time to Put the Heat on the Fed and FDIC to Fix Lousy Governance at TBTF Banks
Adam Levitin makes a sensible recommendation in a new post:
…what’s at stake in the corporate governance of a too-big-to-fail bank like JPMorgan Chase is not just the share price, but also the public fisc. There is a strong federal regulatory interest in having good governance at too-big-to-fail banks because of our explicit (FDIC) and implicit (bailout) insurance of too-big-to-fail banks.
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Read more...More on the Trumped-Up Charges Against Cyprus
As readers may recall, the Eurozone decided to make an example of Cyprus by using it to set the precedent of raiding deposits to fund a bailout (query: is a self-bailout even properly called a bailout?). But the moralists said Cyprus had it coming, since it was a seedy tax haven. A recently released official report summary supports those charges. Or did it?
Read more...Dan Kervick: Reserve Balance Misconceptions
Yves here. While it may seem a bit unfair to make an example of Mark Thoma, since the statement he makes about bank reserves is conventional, Kervick’s post is a useful reminder of why this sort of thinking is misleading.
Read more...Gretchen Morgenson on Bill Moyers: Why Too Big to Fail Still Lives
This Bill Moyers segment gives a welcome view of Gretchen Morgenson recapping the sorry state of the “too big to fail” problem.
Read more...The Fed Has Painted Itself in a Corner
I welcome readers telling me I’ve missed something, but looking at the Fed’s problem from 50,000 feet, it appears that the the monetary authority appears to have set boundary conditions for its QE exit that it can’t meet.
Read more...Is Jamie Dimon Really Out of the Woods With Shareholder Thumbs Down on Splitting CEO/Chairman Roles? (Updated)
There’s a surprising degree of blogosphere acceptance of JP Morgan’s messaging on the shareholder vote today regarding whether to split the CEO and Chairman roles, that this result was a vote of confidence in his prowess as CEO. Huh?
Read more...Catholic Church Voicing Opposition to Eurozone Austerity
It’s been slow in coming, but religious leaders are starting to speak out against the mechanisms and high social cost of austerity.
Read more...Josh Rosner on How Dodd Frank Institutionalizes Too Big to Fail
Josh Rosner of Graham Fisher testifies before a subcommittee of the House Financial Services committee today on why Dodd Frank has not ended too big to fail, but also has managed to entrench the megafirms’ advantaged position.
Read more...Mel Watt, Nominee to Head FHFA, Opposes Administration by Voting to Deregulate Derivatives
Good progressives like MoveOn, New Bottom Line, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, AFR, Elizabeth Warren, and Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO have all fallen in line with Obama’s nomination of Mel Watt, Representative from Bank of America North Carolina.
It might help if they looked harder at Watt. If they were honest about it, there’s not much to like.
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