By Jen Alic, a geopolitical analyst, co-founder of ISA Intel (www.isaintel.com) in Sarajevo and the former editor-in-chief of ISN Security Watch in Zurich. Cross posted from OilPrice
As US power plants lose money, a bit of market manipulation goes a long way … ask JPMorgan Chase.
Read more...During the protracted negotiations over what was to become the 49 state/Federal mortgage settlement, New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman was hailed as a progressive leader and California’s Kamala Harris was characterized as an opportunist.
Turns out the opportunist cut a much better deal for her constituents than the supposed true believer.
Read more...Jack Lew really needs to get better at lying in public. So far, he’s making a hash of it.
Read more...By Lynn Parramore, a senior editor at Alternet. Cross posted from Alternet
The LIBOR price-fixing scam has cost at least $110 million — in the state of Oregon alone!
Read more...A relatively unforeseen implosion in housing markets figured prominently in the 2007 meltdown in capital markets and the subsequent downturn in the global economy. This column presents new research on the political geography of subprime lending. Congressional leaders – as well as other recipients of campaign contributions – may have benefited from gains to trade in the direction, pricing, and sizing of subprime mortgage loans.
Read more...By Abigail Field, an attorney and writer
Eric Schneiderman gets buyers’ remorse. But can he do anything about it?
Read more...The consternation at the not-exactly-a-surprise nomination of billionaire Penny Pritzker to be Commerce Secretary, is sadly much less than is warranted. That suggests that the Forbes 400 member will survive her confirmation hearings. And in a telling bit of synchronicity, last week some fauxgressives set about amplifying an article in the Nation that big bank lobbying efforts were the reason Dodd Frank was amounting to very little. As we’ll discuss, both reflect how much Obama supports the interests of the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate).
Read more...Yves here. I had really wanted to write this piece, but Lynn Parramore beat me to the punch. There’s been almost universal enthusiasm for Brown-Vitter, legislation proposed by Sherrod Brown and David Vitter to get tough with the too-big-to-fail banks. The legislation is sufficiently stringently written that if it were enacted (big if), it would force the banks to make changes to maintain anything remotely resembling their previous profit margins. Goldman and Morgan Stanley would probably drop their banking licenses and the other US systemically dangerous banks would presumably downsize by hiving off major operations.
So what’s not to like? The problem is that the enthusiasts haven’t looked behind the curtain. This bill is being pushed, hard, by big insurers, who would be major winners.
Read more...It’s been far too long in coming, but Jamie Dimon may finally be getting his comeuppance.
Read more...It appears that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Fed dropped the ball yet again on vetting firms involved in the Orwellianly-named Independent Foreclosure Review (IFR) for conflicts of interest. Michael Olenick’s expose on Allonhill, one of the “independent consultants” hired by Wells Fargo, led to Allonhill’s role being curtailed considerably.
But there’s no way to curtail the role of Rust Consulting, a firm that has been central in the Independent Foreclosure Reviews virtually from their onset. And as we’ll see, Rust has ample conflicts of interest when it was engaged to handle mailings and outreach under the IFR, and is about to become even more conflicted.
Read more...By Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics, Barnard College, Columbia University. Cross posted from his blog
One of Kati London’sprojects is Macon Money. This simple experiment, amazingly enough, sheds light on some fundamental questions in monetary economics, helps explain why conventional monetary policy via asset purchases has recently been so ineffective in stimulating the economy, suggests alternative approaches that might be substantially more effective, and speaks to the feasibility of the Chicago Plan (originally advanced by Henry Simons and Irving Fisher, and recently endorsed by a couple of IMF economists) to abolish privately issued money.
Read more...Yves here. This article if anything underplays how much a one-trick pony Luxembourg is and what a fix it is in if Germany and/or the EU continues its campaign against tax avoidance and evasion. Luxembourg hope to come to an understanding with the Eurozone and slowly reach accommodations, which would still shrink its banks, but in a less brutal manner than Cyprus. But with such a large financial sector, any action is still going to cause a fair number of customers to flee. It’s hard to see how any gradual path can be found, which then raises the question of whether a series of bank failures in Luxembourg would have broader ramifications.
Read more...We’ve written before about the perverse phenomenon known as “zombie title.” Kate Berry of American Banker provides an update.
Read more...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...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...