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...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.
Read more...There’s nothing like watching someone who is already in a hole dig deeper.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis gave an energetic, pointed, and insightful talk at the INET conference in Berlin. His message was that the efforts by European authorities were misguided, in that they were seeking to ringfence individual countries, when it was the Eurozone as a whole that needs to be shored up. And he contends this can be done now without special approvals.
Read more...Yves here. While hypocrisy is hardly uncommon in official circles, it is supposed to be kept well out of public view.
Read more...Eric Schneiderman is finding out he sold out to the Administration for far too little.
Read more...Yves here. One of the themes in this Bill Black post is that a senior official who understands the importance of effective regulation can have an impact in a relatively short period of time. It’s important to keep that in mind as a reminder that the obstacle to reining in banks isn’t feasibility but lack of political will.
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. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives.
April 9, 2012 is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the most infamous savings and loan fraud, Charles Keating’s, successful use of five U.S. Senators to escape sanction for a massive violation of the law. The Senators were Alan Cranston (D. CA), Dennis DeConcini (D. AZ), John Glenn (D OH), John McCain (R. AZ), and Donald Riegle (D. MI). They became infamous as the “Keating Five.” I was one of four regulators who attended the April 9, 1987 meeting. I took the notes of the meeting, in transcript format, that were so detailed and accurate that the Senators testified that they were sure I had tape recorded the meeting. (The reality is that I owe my note taking abilities to Bill Valentine, my high school debate coach, and experience debating for the University of Michigan.)
Reviewing my (near) transcript of the April 9 offers a large number of important lessons that would have allowed us to avoid future crises.
Read more...One of our ongoing frustrations about media coverage of the mortgage mess is its failure to pay much attention to ample evidence of substantial servicer overcharges to borrowers. It’s bad enough that that happens, but far worse is that when servicers are told that they’ve been caught out, they refuse to make corrections and stonewall court-ordered remedies.
The facts that have surfaced in before one bankruptcy judge, Elizabeth Magner of the Eastern District of Louisiana, and one servicer, Wells Fargo, should give industry defenders pause.
Read more...The interaction of immovable objects and inexorable forces is seldom pretty. One example is housing finance in the US. If no one blinks, an ugly situation could get even worse.
Read more...James Kenneth Galbraith is currently a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and at the Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin. He is also a Senior Scholar with the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is ‘Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis’ (also available on Kindle).
Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington.
Philip Pilkington: Let’s start with the obvious question that the book raises. Namely, why studies on inequality have, until this point, been so poor. You point out in the book that the studies that have been done have been competently researched but that they simply don’t have access to the correct types of data etc. Could you talk a little about this (without getting too technical, of course) and maybe speculate a little about why this important issue has been sidetracked by the economic profession?
Read more...A ruling in the Retirement Board of the Policemen’s Annuity and Benefit Fund of the City of Chicago et al v. Bank of New York Mellon is a game-changer in mortgage investor litigation.
Read more...Edward Harrison here. We seem to be moving forward with this discussion on monetary policy, banking, and reserves. Things seemed to be veering wildly off track but I have seen a huge number of good comments in the last 24 hours. Now, John Carney does a good job of summarising some of the initial forays […]
Read more...Recall when yours truly attended Americatalyst, a real housing/mortgage nerd conference last November, and the panel that was asked to forecast housing had no one predicting more than a 2-3% decline? I was gobsmacked because no one seemed to be acknowledging the huge number of foreclosures in process plus those likely to happen (“shadow inventory”).
Moody’s has focused on one aspect of the issue and does not like what it sees.
Read more...Bonnie Faulkner of Pacifica Radio’s Guns and Butter show broadcast the presentation by Stephanie Kelton and Michael Hudson on “There IS An Alternative To European Austerity: Modern Money Theory” . presented at the Italian MMT Summit last month. You can listen to the recording here, or read key parts of the transcript below.
Read more...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 MacroBusiness.
The pain in Spain continues with the government releasing the country’s latest budget which has been described by some Spanish economists as ‘the most severe since Franco’
Read more...