In the final hours of the 2012 Presidential campaign, Obama backers have been trumpeting the case for their candidate, and like most electioneering, some of the claims don’t stand up well to scrutiny, particularly regarding the impact of regulations on big financial firm profits.
Read more...As a result of fully warranted bad press for some privatization deals, such as the lease of Chicago’s parking meters, there has been a bit (stress only a bit) more critical scrutiny of the de facto sale of public assets to consortia of private investors. Nevertheless, major banks have been using the financial distress of states and municipalities to push these deals as a solution to budget woes, when it’s a short-term expedient that leaves the public worse off.
Read more...With Hurricane Sandy dominating the news, quite a few business stories from early in the week got only cursory notice. In some ways, that’s not a bad thing.
The Wall Street Journal had a bizarre sequence of reports on Jon Corzine.
Read more...Around the anniversary of the official birth of Occupy Wall Street, a host of bank affiliated financial reporters used the occasion to designate the movement a failure in surprisingly strident terms. Why the need to kick a dead horse?
Read more...The spectacle of failure being rewarded during the financial crisis while the rest of us suffered in the resulting economic downdraft has led even people who are cautious about regulation in goods markets to acknowledge that finance is different and needs vigilant oversight. The fact that Elizabeth Warren took her job as the head of the Congressional Oversight Panel seriously produced a huge win for the public. And that is the sort of thing you’d expect if we had more tough-minded regulators in place.
Read more...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
Obama intends to begin to unravel the safety net (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) to convince the Republicans to enter into this Faustian bargain. Just as only a conservative Republican could visit “Red” China, only a Democrat can begin the destruction of the safety net. The difference, of course, is that normalizing relations with China was a good thing while unraveling the safety net is a terrible thing.
Read more...By Michael M. Thomas, who figured out Wall Street was not all it was cracked up to be before most of you were born
More than any other forum, Naked Capitalism consistently suggests and proposes new ways to bridge what I consider the abyss that will one day sink us all if Koch brothers-style politics and capitalism have their way: the chasm that lies between what we need to know and what we have been (and will be) allowed to know.
Read more...The Wall Street Journal has an important story on a phenomenon that’s likely to get more attention by virtue of growth: that of middle aged and elderly Americans saddled by significant amounts of student debt.
Read more...It was Bill Moyers who used the expression “incestuous orgy” in this interview with former head of SIGTARP Neil Barofsky to describe the relationship between major financial firms and the Federal government. That beats the anodyne “revolving door” all day and I hope becomes part of the lexicon for describing the capture of Washington by Wall Street.
Read more...Bill Moyers was taken enough with his chat with former SIGTARP chief Neil Barofsky that he’s having two segments with him.
Read more...By Rowan Bosworth-Davies, a former head of investigations at regulator FIMBRA (Financial Intermediaries, Managers and Brokers Regulatory Association) and a former Scotland Yard Fraud Squad detective. Cross posted from Ian Fraser’s blog
“Go where you will, in business parts, or meet who you like of businessmen, it is – and has been for the last three years – the same story and the same lament. Dishonesty, untruth, and what may, in plain English, be termed mercantile swindling within the limits of the law, exists on all sides and on every quarter…”
No, this is not a comment from a contemporary website. It comes from an editorial published in Temple Bar – A London Magazine for Town and Country Readers in 1866. It was written at a time when England was experiencing a plethora of fraudulent offerings in railway shares, but the tenor of its complaint is as relevant today as it was then.
Read more...An important piece in the Financial Times by Manmohan Singh, a senior economist at the International Monetary Fund, describes persuasively how one of the central vehicles for reducing derivatives risk, that of having a central counterparty (CCP) and requiring dealers to trade with it rather than have a web of bi-lateral exposures, or rely on banks to act as clearers (making them too big to fail) has gone pear shaped. While the immediate reason for this outcome is the unwillingness of national banking regulators to cede powers to an international clearinghouse, Singh fingers an equally important cause: the reluctance to recognize that the underlying problem was and remains undercollateralized derivatives positions. His introduction to the mess:
Read more...By Delusional Economics, who is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.
So it’s yet another two days where the leaders of the EU get together for a dinner (this time it’s tarte, fine eggs/mushrooms, braised veal on bed of fresh spinach followed by a chocolate trio) and attempt to thrash out greater economic integration.
Read more...By Marcy Wheeler. Cross posted from emptywheel
As TPM’s Ryan Reilly noted yesterday, among the awards Attorney General Eric Holder gave out at yesterday’s Attorney General’s Award Ceremony was a Distinguished Service Award to John Durham’s investigative team that chose not to prosecute Jose Rodriguez or the torturers who killed their victims.
Read more...Bank stress tests have become a contemporary exercise in “the emperor has no clothes”. Everyone by now (or at least everyone who pays attention) knows that the stress tests are an exercise in confidence building, with emphasis on the “con”.
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