Memo to Schneiderman Mortgage Task Force: When You are in a Hole, Quit Digging
The much ballyhooed mortgage task force seems to be hewing to the Obama play book of believing that any problem can be solved with better propaganda.
Read more...Category Archives: Banking industry
Morgan Sandquist: Finance in Denial – The Addiction
By Morgan Sandquist, a member of the Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking Group. Cross posted from mathbabe
Is it fair to say that because the quality of the denial surrounding the banking industry’s problems is so similar to that of the denial surrounding addiction, that addiction is therefore the root of those problems and our ongoing failure to adequately address them? Perhaps not, but others have come to describe money, debt, and banking as something very much like addiction for entirely different, and far better argued, reasons.
Read more...Reining in Finance and the Effort to Silence a Critical UN Agency
This Real News Network segment gives a window into the efforts to squash criticism of the neoliberal orthodoxy in the world of international agencies. Even though the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) gets very little attention in the major media, its well researched and often prescient reports are enough of a threat to the orthodoxy to produce efforts by the advanced economy block in the UN to try to clip the wings of the agency. The start of this interview may seem like a bit of inside baseball, but it shortly gets to issues that are critically important.
Read more...Morgan Sandquist: Finance in Denial
By Morgan Sandquist, a member of the Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking Group. Cross posted from mathbabe
The largest banks in America–Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and others–are probably insolvent.
Read more...The ECB is on Mars
By Delusional Economics, who is horrified at the state of economic commentary in Australia and is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2012/04/spain-has-only-denial/“>MacroBusiness.
Overnight the president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, gave a speech to the Hearing at the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of the European Parliament. The speech was not particularly out of line with what Mr Draghi usually says…
Read more...Mirabile Dictu! Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein Makes Case for Breaking Up Big Banks
Goldman seems to be making a renewed effort at PR in the wake of the letter by derivatives staffer Greg Smith accusing the firm of caring only about profits and treating customers as stuffees (“muppets” was revealed to be the new term of art). That observation probably came as no surprise to anyone save Goldman staffers, most of whom probably thought they had conned their clients into believing otherwise, and a few like Smith who believed the party line.
The Goldman CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, had an interview today with a very friendly outlet, Bloomberg News. The chat served to remind viewers of how inward looking and self referential the financial services industry has become.
Read more...Fed Paper on Repo Exposes Inadequacy of Financial Reforms
I’m late to write on a terrific and largely unnoticed paper presented at the Federal Reserve Board’s research conference on “Central Banking: Before, During and After the Crisis” in late March (hat tip Michael C). “A Proposal for the Resolution of Systemically Important Assets and Liabilities: The Case of the Repo Market” by Viral V. Acharya and T. Sabri Öncu could be more accurately titled, “What Financial Reform Missed.”
Read more...Daniel Alpert: Earth to Paul Krugman
By Daniel Alpert, the founding Managing Partner of Westwood Capital. Cross posted from EconoMonitor
This past Sunday, Paul Krugman penned a screed in the New York Times Magazine (entitled, somewhat unflatteringly in my opinion, “Earth to Ben Bernanke”) that expanded on the content of an ongoing debate in the economics blogosphere over the contents of the mind of Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke.
Professor Krugman has posited for months now that Bernanke has come up short…..
Read more...The Hidden Bank Time Bomb: Interest Rate Risk
At the Atlantic Economy Summit in Washington last month, Sheila Bair fielded a question about the just-released results of the latest bank stress tests. The former FDIC chief took pains to point out that they were an improvement over earlier iterations by virtue of keying off a truly dire economic scenario, but then ticked off a number of ways in which they fell short.
Read more...UK Fund Manager Challenges Deutsche Bank on Executive Pay
It’s taken a few years, but the revolt against extractive pay in banking is getting traction.
Read more...The Ministry of Truth Speaks: American Prospect Tries to Pass Off Mortgage Turncoat Schneiderman as Hero
I’m not looking forward to months of pre-election image-burnishing fabrication. The nausea-inducing offering of the day, The Man the Banks Fear Most from the American Prospect, gives us an idea of what we have in store.
The good news is that this revisionist history on the craven sellout by Eric Schneiderman on the mortgage settlement appears to be in response to a damaging New York Daily News article last week.
Read more...Michael Olenick: Rentals Gone Wild
Banks are manipulating the housing supply in an attempt to reignite a bubble to hide their losses, a strategy that’s temporarily working.
Read more...The Burgeoning Student Debt Problem
Even though other consumer debt-bombs have done more damage, student debt is producing significant social and economic distortions.
Read more...CFPB Scrutinizing Bank Overdraft Fees
While the mortgage settlement sellout has been a singularly depressing process, once in a while there are encouraging bits of news on the bank regulation front.
An open question has been whether the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would live up to its promise.
Read more...Andrew Haldane on the Arms Race in Banking
Regular NC readers have seen us repeatedly invoke the work of Andrew Haldane, the executive director of stability of the Bank of England. His thoughtful and original work on the risks and costs of our financial system have provided serious ammunition for reform advocates.
At the recent INET conference in Berlin, Haldane recapped some of his recent observations under the rubric of an arms race, in which efforts of individual players to improve their own position wind up leaving everyone worse off.
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