The short answer to the question in the headline is “When there are no rules.” A headline in a current Bloomberg story illustrates the problem: “Goldman Sachs, Greece Didn’t Disclose Swap, Investors ‘Fooled’.” “Fooled” is an unusual choice of words, particularly when applied to to presumed grown-ups like institutional investors and international overseers. Bloomberg seems […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0. Surprise, surprise: Wall Street tactics akin to the ones that fostered subprime mortgages in America have worsened the financial crisis shaking Greece, Spain, Portugal, and undermined the euro by enabling European governments to hide their mounting debts. This has now […]
Read more...In a New York Times op-ed late last year, Bill Black, Frank Partnoy, and Eliot Spitzer called for an open source investigation: we know where the answers are. They are in the trove of e-mail messages still backed up on A.I.G. servers, as well as in the key internal accounting documents and financial models generated […]
Read more...Can someone shut these banking industry narcissists up? The one and only time I met Steve Schwarzman was in 1986, when he and Pete Peterson had just started the Blackstone Group. I was a manager (meaning a mid level working oar) at McKinsey. We had teed up a deal and were assisting our foreign client […]
Read more...The top story at the Financial Times at this hour, “‘Volcker rule’ gives Goldman stark choice,” is a accurate report of Paul Volcker’s latest remarks, but gives a wildly misleading impression of the “choice” facing Goldman: Goldman Sachs and other banks should give up their bank status if they want to avoid the ban on […]
Read more...Readers may know that one point of contention in the worries about Greece’s deficits is that it had hidden the fact that it violated Maastricht rule that fine eurozone countries whose fiscal deficits exceed 3% of GDP. How was this subterfuge achieved? While the Greek government engaged in some bogus accounting on its own, it […]
Read more...By Yves Smith and Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive Gretchen Morgenson has a lengthy article tonight at the New York Times, “Testy Conflict With Goldman Helped Push A.I.G. to Edge.” While it provides some useful new tidbits, it peculiarly focuses on an aspect of Goldman’s dealings with AIG that, particularly with the […]
Read more...One of the impediments to getting to the bottom of the financial crisis is some of the most destructive behavior involved complex instruments like collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. It isn’t simply that these “innovations” had terms and features that differ from familiar investments like stocks and bonds, but the way those instruments […]
Read more...If anyone had any doubts as to whether the Federal Reserve should assume the role of systemic risk regulator, a comment in the Financial Times by Board of Governors member Kevin Warsh, based on a speech he is to give later today, puts the matter firmly to rest. No matter how logically positioned a central […]
Read more...As readers may know, the financial reforms proposed by the Obama administration barely deserve the name. The late-in-the-game efforts to rebrand the effort by putting Paul Volcker in the forefront and patch up one of the gaping holes, that the government is backstopping risky trading businesses (Goldman Sachs has issued FDIC guaranteed bonds) illustrates the […]
Read more...The current issue of Institutional Risk Analytics discusses an issue that is a tad arcane for many readers, but more important than it seems on the surface. The 2005 bankruptcy law changes, among other things, provided that that derivative transactions were exempt from bankruptcy provisions, meaning that creditors have to put in their claims against […]
Read more...Paul Volcker has an op-ed in the New York Times that made my stomach sink. I had considerable hopes for Volcker’s involvement in financial reform; he’s one of the few regulators with the stature (literally and figuratively) who can say things to bankers, the media, and government officials that are unpalatable yet need to be […]
Read more...By Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive, and Yves Smith For those of you who followed the House Oversight Committee hearings on the Fed’s conduct in the AIG bailout, one focus of discussion was the Fed’s efforts to keep the details of the CDOs that the Fed effectively bought via an entity it […]
Read more...No matter which way you look at it, the picture that is emerging of the Federal Reserve, as revealed by the ongoing probes into its AIG bailout, is singularly unflattering. The explanations for its actions can only support one of two interpretations: that the Fed was a chump, taken by the financiers, or a crony, […]
Read more...Rep. Darrell Issa of the House Oversight Committee has asked to Committee Chairman Towns to subpoena more documents from the Fed regarding its decision-making process in the AIG bailout. Readers have no doubt noted that the efforts so far have been to try to infer how much Geithner was involved in this process. We’ve noted […]
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