Submitted by Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns. So, things are looking a lot brighter we are told by most economists and policy makers. The crisis is over and the banking system is on the mend. Now is the time for true reform and for bankers to get back to business as usual. While the foregoing […]
Read more...What amounted to a statement of principles and a very few stakes in the ground from Timothy Geithner on financial reform got a largely hostile reaction from Congress (see Ed Harrison here and here for further detail). The main criticism was that the notion of making the Fed the uber stability regulator/financial system overseer (officially, […]
Read more...We’ve written off and on since late last year that the continuing cutbacks in credit cards would hurt small businesses, which have been the biggest source of job creation in the US for quite a stretch. The importance of credit cards as a source of funding to small companies has gone largely unnoticed in the […]
Read more...Submitted by Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns. If you listen to the criticism from the right and from the left, from pro-regulation and anti-regulation pundits, you can understand the political constraints which produced the white paper which the President unveiled yesterday. Given those constraints, I consider the white paper a good effort. My initial reaction, […]
Read more...Submitted by Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns. Having read through the draft of President Obama’s financial regulatory proposal, my initial reaction is largely positive. He sets the right tone and says all of the right things. However, the devil is in the details and we will need to see how these firm up as these […]
Read more...Submitted by Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns. This morning I was reading Simon Johnson’s excellent post “President Obama’s Regulatory Reforms Announcement: A Viewer’s Guide” about what Barack Obama should say when he makes his regulatory reform pitch today at 12:30 PM. I agree with what he has to say about the need to re-assure us […]
Read more...The Treasury Department’s plans for securitization reform are being bandied about in the press. A key question is whether it can or will fix the now-broken private securitization process. Credit became more dependent on securitization than many realize. By pretty much any metric, the role of banks relative to other players has declined since 1980, […]
Read more...Submitted by Edward Harrison of the site Credit Writedowns. The drama at Bank of America continues with Ken Lewis testifying before Congress today. Most of the events surround claims by Lewis that he was coerced into doing the Merrill deal by Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke. I chronicled these events when they were made public […]
Read more...Submitted by Edward Harrison of the site Credit Writedowns. I am not the only one who sees events in Latvia as a potential catalyst for further downside risk to the reflation trade. Mary Stokes over at Nouriel Roubini’s site has a very readable post out on why we should be watching events in that tiny […]
Read more...The Financial Times reports that the House Oversight committee wants to have a little chat with the Fed over the widespread reports that it muscled BofA more than a tad to complete its acquisition of Merrill after the Charlotte bank learned that the securities firm had posted large losses in December and tried to exit […]
Read more...Readers have been sending various Pangloss/Orwell sightings on a daily basis, with one’s take on whether they fall in the absurdist or merely creeping authoritarian camp depending on one’s degree of cynicism. I have only posed about 1/10th of them simply because it often takes a fair bit of parsing (headline v. meaningful comment close […]
Read more...I am throwing a line of thinking out in the hope of getting reader input. I put a post up a couple of days ago on looting and am still puzzling the question. I believe that deregulation led to looting, in the Akeloff/Romer sense, that people at Wall Street firms were overpaid relative to the […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal has an eyepopping item tonight: The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is pushing for a shake-up of Citigroup Inc.’s top management, imperiling Chief Executive Vikram Pandit… The FDIC, under Chairman Sheila Bair, also recently pressed a fellow regulator to lower the government’s confidential ranking of Citi’s health — a change that would […]
Read more...Yesterday, we highlighted yet another indication that one of two parts of the infamous Public Private Investment Partnership, the so called Legacy Loans Program, was being delayed, possibly on a permanent basis (or more likely, it will be launched eventually to save bureaucratic face and have weak to non-existent take-up). Its evil twin, the program […]
Read more...Readers may recall that we were early to deride the Paulson Master Liquidity Enhancement Conduit, and its different in name, same in intent and basic form successors. Every one of these had the same premise: find a way for banks to offload their dreck. But the only way the banks would do that voluntarily was […]
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