Soon-to-be-unemployed sports team managers the world over know what it means when they receive an affirmation of full confidence from the club chairman. Accordingly, we know roughly what to make of this: ‘The Bank of England has credibility,’ said Osborne (pictured). ‘I have complete confidence in it.’ The chancellor will not alter the 2% inflation […]
Read more...As readers may have noticed, I grumbled over the weekend about the decision by federal prosecutors not to bring charges against Countrywide’s Angelo Mozilo. I attributed it to two causes: extreme deregulation (you can’t prosecute if virtually nothing is a crime) and timid prosecutors. A lively debate arose in comments, with our Richard Kline contending that the real reason no Big Name had been brought to justice is that a trial would make it all too evident that there were plenty of other powerful people who had committed equally heinous acts. Can’t expose how widespread corruption is, now can we?
Other readers argued the revolving door issue, which was (in essence) don’t ruffle the law firms that will be your prospective employers. I begged to differ, in that tough, effective prosecutors were magnets for new law school grads precisely because they were great training grounds. Someone who came out of those boot camps would be more valuable than a largely untested staff member at a regulatory agency.
I got this e-mail from someone who has seen the SEC from the inside:
Read more...Paul Krugman was kind enough to link to me with respect to a Guardian article pointing to his criticism of the fiscal stance, and arguably more important, the political role that the Bank of England governor Mervyn King is taking. However, Krugman said I was in error in claiming he never criticized Greenspan for compromising Fed independence.
As an aside, I’m taking King’s side a bit more than I might otherwise. Yes, I agree fully with Krugman that austerity is a bad idea in the UK and pretty much anywhere still in a hangover after the global financial crisis. But there seems to be a lot of opportunism in the broadsides against King. He is the only central banker that has stood firm against the bad practices of the major dealer banks. And his dim view is reportedly widely shared among Bank of England staff. My sense (which UK readers confirm) is that the piling on seems unduly aggressive, and looks to be an effort to discredit King in order to weaken him (and as much as possible, the Bank) as a reformer.
I’m still going to quibble a bit. The NC remark in question about Krugman was: “And he’s said nothing about the “political” Greenspan and Bernanke.”
Read more...It is a tribute to the messaging skills of the American corpocracy that a phony budget crisis in Wisconsin has been used to scapegoat unions. This row serves as a very convenient way to shift attention from the real cause of fiscal stress in states that have serious budget gaps (yes, there are a very few states like New Jersey that have gaping pension shortfalls, thanks to years of government use of wildly optimistic return assumptions as an excuse to underfund them, but contrary to the railing of Chris Christie, his state’s problem is an outliers).
First, let’s debunk a couple of issues thrown out by Wisconsin governor Walker’s camp before turning to the real culprit in state budget’s supposed tsuris. The state budget is not in any kind of real peril. The Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimated that the state would end fiscal year 2011 with a gross positive balance of $121. 4 million and a net balance (after mandated reserves) of $56.4 million. Walker asserts there is actually a $137 million deficit. But where did that change come from? Lee Sheppard of Forbes estimated that Walker’s tax cuts for businesses would cost at the bare minimum $100 million over the state’s biennial budget cycle. Other sources put a firmer stake in the ground and estimate the costs at at $140 million. Viola! Being nice to your best buddies means you need to go after someone else.
The second major canard is that Wisconsin state employees are overpaid.
Read more...The New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenson dutifully tells us, based on a Los Angeles Times sighting, that federal prosecutors will not be filing charges against the Tanned One, Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide. This follows the failure of investigations to lead to a criminal prosecution of another major perp in the financial crisis, one Joseph Cassano, the head of AIG’s Financial Products unit.
There has been far too little discussion of why no legal action has been taken.
Readers can no doubt come up with additional reasons, but I see at least two.
Read more...They must put something in the water at the Fed, certainly the Board of Governors and the New York Fed. Everyone there, or at least pretty much everyone who gets presented to the media, seems to have an advanced form of mental illness, namely, an pronounced inability to admit error. While many in public life suffer from this particular affliction, it appears pervasive at the Fed. Examples abound including an overt ones like an article attempting to bolster the party line that no one, and hence certainly not the central bank, could have seen the housing bubble coming, or subtler ones, like a long paper on the shadow banking system that I did not bother to shred because doing it right would have tried reader patience Among other things, it endeavored to present the shadow banking system as virtuous (a necessary position since the Fed bailed it out) because it was all tied to securtization and hence credit intermediation. That framing conveniently omits the role of credit default swaps and how they multiplied the worst credit risks well beyond real economy exposure levels and concentrated them in highly geared financial firms.
Another example of the “it is never the Fed’s fault” disease reared its ugly head in the context of the G20 meetings.
Read more...It is really annoying when people, particularly those in positions of power, can’t even be bothered to take the trouble to lie well.
As we noted back in November, in a post titled, “Foreclosure Task Force: Worse Than Stress Tests?“, the officialdom was embarking on yet another hollow exercise in oversight:
Read more...Felix Salmon reports on a conversation with departing assistant Treasury Secretary Michael Barr on newly-commenced reviews of the practices of bank servicers.
Barr’s patter might sound convincing to the uninformed. An “11-agency, 8-week review of servicer practices, with hundreds of investigators crawling all over the banks”! Promises to hold miscreants accountable! Banks required to fix what’s broken!
Felix was skeptical, noting that the reviews were effectively a “physician, heal thyself” approach to a part of the banking business that has proven to be unable to change behavior…
In addition, as Felix pointed out, if the exams were to uncover issues that might pose systems risk, the Treasury is certain to reason to minimize them…
This “review” is clearly a Potemkin exercise, yet another stress test-type charade, in which the facade of a serious investigation is used to sell the message that all is well in the banking industry.
The chattering classes of the left are encouraged by the spectacle of 14 Wisconsin state senators having the intestinal fortitude to deny the governor a quorum for a budget vote that includes provisions to strip most state employees of virtually all of their collective bargaining rights. They were in turn emboldened by large scale demonstrations in the capitol, which seemed to get their momentum from the fact that students, rather than taking the day off when teachers called in sick so they could protest, turned out in large numbers to support them.
Don’t underestimate the ability of the Democrats to trade this opportunity away. All the defecting Senators are asking for is to slow down the process and negotiate the bill. Sounds reasonable, right?
As someone who been party to deal-making, the problem with being reasonable and measured is that that only works with fair-minded and/or experienced opponents. Being non-negotiable is not only terribly effective (you throw a tantrum and then make only token concessions to let the other side save a teeny bit of face), it also takes comparatively little in the way of bargaining skills.
The right wing, for the most part, has made being unreasonable and non-negotiable part of its branding. The left, peculiarly, has not adapted. And the result is that it too often winds up ceding way more ground than it needs to.
Many readers will point out that this ineffectiveness serves as useful protective cover, particularly with the Obama Administration. It has repeatedly sought to have its cake and eat it too, by appealing to as much as possible of the traditional Democratic base (which they figure they can abuse, since it has nowhere to go) while also playing up to corporate backers. The true state of play has reached the point that even purveyors of leading edge conventional wisdom like Jeffrey Sachs are now willing to say that we have two center-right parties in the US.
But this, while true, misses an underlying pathology.
Read more...A major row has been under way in Wisconsin as governor Walker has been trying to push through state-union-breaking changes as part of his program to deal with a projected $3 billion shortfall in the state budget over the next two years. (Update: as reader petrograd indicates, an analysis of the state’s finances shows this shortfall to be entirely the result of spending increases planned by Walker. The state ran a modest surplus in the latest fiscal year and the projected falls in tax receipts over the next two years were less than $200 million cumulative. So this budget hysteria is a gross distortion of the state’s true condition).
His state budget plan included ending state worker collective bargaining rights and cutting pay and benefits. He not only said he would not negotiate, but announced he had alerted the National Guard in the event of worker protests (note the last time the Guard was called in to handle a labor dispute was in 1934). Walker since backed down on this particular threat, but has now sent out state police to round up Democratic state senators who are refusing to vote on the latest iteration of Walker’s proposal, From PRWatch:
Read more...Mary Bottari reports that the state capitol police are scouring the Wisconsin Capitol in an attempt to track down the Wisconsin Senate Democratic Caucus. The Wisconsin Senate was slated to vote on the budget bill today, but they were prevented from doing so because all Democratic Senators walked out denying the Republicans a necessary quorum. The Republicans issued a “call of the house” empowering the state capitol police to round up missing Senators, but the Democrats were prepared for this and promptly departed the building and may even have left the state.
Well, it was obvious that this bullet point from the Merlin agreement: implementing and applying European and international rules to create a level playing field in both policy and practice whilst protecting and maintaining the particular strength of UK financial services, and without pre-judging the outcome of the Independent Commission on Banking (IBC). was a […]
Read more...There’s a fine new piece by Matt Taibbi on the utter lack of criminal prosecutions on Wall Street, particularly of the big perps. He goes through a series of well known instances of actual (to everyone save the prosecutors) cases of chicanery, ranging from Freddie Mac accounting fraud, the protection of Morgan Stanley CEO from insider trading charges, Lehman’s misleading reporting of restricted stock payments, and gives the sordid details of how whistleblowers were ignored and aggressive SEC staff like Gary Aguirre were fired.
To my mind, the juiciest and most depressing part of the story comes fairly late in the piece, when Aguirre attends a day long conference last November (with a $2200 price tag) on financial law enforcement. This is what “enforcement” looks like:
Read more...We posted last week about the NYT’s smear of Mervyn King (as did London Banker), and followed that up with some observations on the UK Chancellor’s dreary capitulation to the banks, aka “Project Merlin”; we concluded somewhat world-wearily by promising more sightings of attempts to nobble the UK’s radical bank reformers. Well, here’s the first, […]
Read more...As readers no doubt know, the Treasury Department released its overdue plan for reform of the Fannie and Freddie, otherwise known as GSEs (for “government sponsored enterprise”) last Friday. We were surprised that some normally astute commentators, such as Mike Konczal and Felix Salmon, were taken in by this thin and misleading document. As banking expert Chris Whalen said by e-mail, “The proposal is completely disingenuous. Read 180 degrees opposite what it says.”
What is particularly striking is it is not very difficult to difficult to see through the stage management. Throughout the document, the Treasury calls its proposal a “plan” when it is anything but. Putting some stakes in the ground and then offering three mutually exclusive alternatives and no timetable for resolution is not a plan.
The reason for this failure to put forward a real proposal is that Treasury is trying to present itself as a fair broker of a politically fraught process. But that’s bunk. The outcome, unless the public wakes up to this new effort at looting, is already clear.
The fix is just about in.
Read more...Readers have hopefully had the opportunity to read “The Center for American Progress Objects to Our Critique of Its GSE Reform Plan”, which contained an e-mail by David Min of the Center for American Progress presenting its bones of contention.
While we appreciate that the CAP has gone to the trouble to communicate with us directly, we are not persuaded by its arguments.
We’ll recap the e-mail and then address the issues individually:
1. You need to have some form of government guarantee to have a mortgage product that is fair to middle class consumers (his writing is a bit confused, at one point he uses “no” when he means “yes”, but this is the drift of his gist).
2. We’ve mistated who would eat “catastrophic risk” under the CAP scheme, since the Catastrophic Risk Fund and the new mortgage insurer investors would take losses first
3. Not all “banks” are behind or support the CAP proposal
4. This plan is the best option for the public and less lucrative to the financial services industry than a “privatization” model
Let’s dispatch these arguments in order.
Read more...We received this e-mail from David Min on February 11 about our post titled, “Wall Street Co-Opting Nominally Liberal Think Tanks; Banks Lobbying to Become New GSEs.” That piece took a dim view of a GSE “reform” proposal from the Center for American Progress, which we pointed out is “THE mainstream Democratic think tank for Congress and the administration”.
We must note that this message mischaracterizes some aspects of our post (for instance, we discussed at length in the our post why we thought the catastrophic risk fund would come up short, and this e-mail does not address our argument). Nevertheless, we thought readers would be interested in his message. From Min:
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