An op-ed in the Sunday New York Times by former investigators and prosecutors Eliot Spitzer, Frank Parnoy, and William Black calls for AIG to put non-privileged e-mails, accounting documents, and financial models on line to allow for an “open source” investigation. The questions they want to examine include: As fraud investigators, we would like to […]
Read more...The UK is providing a lesson the US badly needs to learn, that push comes to shove, regulators hold the whip, and have to be willing to use it when necessary. Given how intransigent the financial services industry has become, the time for discipline has come. Maybe some of them even want it secretly…. In […]
Read more...The party line is that Ben Bernanke’s confirmation for a second term as Fed chief is a shoe-in, although he might face an unseemly amount of roughing up, like having to step down briefly if the senators who plan to put a hold on his vote succeed in delaying it beyond the end of January. […]
Read more...The latest WSJ/NBC News poll shows that President Obama’s approval rating has now slipped under 50%. This makes his the steepest first year decline in modern history. Why? You know what I would say: Obama doesn’t know when to be an asshole Obama wasted political capital on bank bailouts See what Aaron Task and Henry […]
Read more...Well, because he is a man of probity and is writing in the UK, where the standards for libel are much lower than in the US, former Barclays CEO Martin Taylor does not use the F (fraud) word, but that is precisely the behavior he describes. I know it is fashionable to depict the investment […]
Read more...Senator Jim Bunning gave a long, detailed, specific, and very good list of questions to Fed chair Ben Bernanke, and Bunning has posted the resulting Q&A on his website. I find this a pretty remarkable document. While a certain amount of bureaucratic jousting is to be expected (ie, there is a level of artful dodging […]
Read more...We weren’t impressed by Obama’s supposedly tough rhetoric on bankers on 60 Minutes (it pales next to what FDR dished out in his 1933 inaugural address, and discourse was more elevated then than now). It was namby pamby at best. That limp-wristed effort to look more determined to Do Something to mask the fact that […]
Read more...This is a guest post by Edward Harrison. There has been quite a lot of to-do about President Obama’s fat cat remarks and his meeting with bankers exhorting them to lend (which some attended via conference call only, ouch). Let me tie these events in with a few other themes into a comprehensive picture of […]
Read more...By Tim Duncan, Chairman of American Business Leaders for Financial Reform The Wall Street Journal tells us tonight that the banking industry has agreed to push for regulation after Monday’s White House meeting: Chief executives of the largest U.S. banks acknowledged Monday the “disconnect” between their expressed support for re-regulating financial markets and the work […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0. President Obama is taking a sharp, populist tone with Wall Street and scolding the ways of Washington. Once again, he is looking to the Senate to follow the House and pass a top legislative priority: sweeping financial regulatory reform. It […]
Read more...Are we supposed to take this posturing seriously? The media is now peddling more and more banker-favoring narratives with a straight face. The Columbia Journalism Review described one last week, how a little Goldman Kabuki theater to appease the peasants was incorrectly depicted as a serious move: …the press way overplays what is essentially a […]
Read more...A provocative report by the New Economics Foundation has made an effort to put a price tag on the broader costs and benefits of various types of work. As quoted in the Financial Times (hat tip Swedish Lex), the leader of this effort put it: Pay levels often don’t reflect the true value that is […]
Read more...I’m curious to get reader views on this one, since even the normally jaundiced Reuters noted in its coverage that the 11th hour bailout was “the least expected of all options Dubai had on the table.” Abu Dhabi had made it sound as if it would help, but that it also was going to extract […]
Read more...Wow, so it wasn’t Turbo Timmy, the AIG rescue, the alphabet soup of Fed currency facilities or the currency swaps that saved the global banking system. The marginal suppliers of capital, according to the UN, were drug lords. That means that the UN is saying that the banks went into the money-laundering business on a […]
Read more...By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns Matt Taibbi is one of the few commentators in the mainstream media who is not worried about ‘access’ and has, therefore, been free to write much more critically about the economic crisis and reform efforts on Wall Street. His first piece was a polemic against Goldman Sachs, which triggered […]
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