Category Archives: Federal Reserve

Taleb Calls Out Alan Blinder for Questionable Actions

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has an intriguing piece at Huffington Post, “The Regulator Franchise, or the Alan Blinder Problem,” with a juicy anecdote at its core. It highlights a critical issue: how we’ve come to accept what other eras would view as dubious conduct as business as usual. Note that Taleb does a particularly artful job […]

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Knives Out for Elizabeth Warren

It should come as no surprise that a financial services industry powerful enough to water down meaningful reform in the US and internationally (Basel III rules were weakened to allow, for instance, that mortgage servicing rights be included in regulatory capital calculations) would probably have its way in blocking the nomination of Elizabeth Warren as […]

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Should We Buy Fed’s Reports of Gains on AIG Bailout Vehicles?

Readers may recall that the Federal Reserve created three vehicles to hold dodgy assets it obtained via the Bear and AIG bailouts, namely Maiden Lane (for Bear), Maiden Lane II (for AIG residential mortgage backed securities) and Maiden Lane III (for CDOs the Fed bought as part of taking out AIG credit default swap counterparties […]

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UK’s FSA to Restrain Pay of Hedge Fund and Investment Managers

Why oh why is it that the US media treats financial services compensation levels as a third rail issue? Rent extraction was the driver of the financial crisis, and the financial services sector made it clear in 2009, by paying itself record bonuses on the heels of being saved from certain death, that it had […]

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Something has to give

Cross-posted from The price of everything By Tim Price, Director of Investment at PFP Wealth Management, a London-based fund manager “More than half of all workers have experienced a spell of unemployment, taken a cut in pay or hours or been forced to go part-time. The typical unemployed worker has been jobless for nearly six […]

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Summer Rerun: The Fed: The Need for a Paradigm Shift

This post first appeared on May 1, 2007 Due to Paul Volcker’s having broken the back of inflation in the early 1980s, and Alan Greenspan performing what appears to be adequately on the substance of his job and masterfully at the showmanship, the Fed’s reputation is at an all time high. And that in and […]

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Summer Rerun: “Toothless Fed”

This post first appeared on March 26, 2007 The post below is from a reader, DS. He focuses on the fact that the Fed has basically admitted that its powers are limited due to the extent of financial activity that takes place outside its purview (the Fed supervises federally-chartered banks; securities firms, which are regulated […]

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Decoding the NY Fed on Shadow Banking

Back to this thing to try to work out what it’s driving at. Yves wrote: I have serious trouble with its bottom line: We document that the shadow banking system became severely strained during the financial crisis because, like traditional banks, shadow banks conduct credit, maturity, and liquidity transformation, but unlike traditional financial intermediaries, they […]

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Summer Rerun: “Why America Will Need Some Elements of a Welfare State”

This post first appeared on February 14, 2007 An excellent column by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times, where he is the lead economics editor. Starting with principles put forward by Ben Bernanke in his recent speech on income inequality, Wolf concludes that America cannot do without some form of a welfare state, specifically improved […]

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Is the Fed Happy with the Crappy Economy?

Is the economics version of defining deviancy downward mean that the new normal of high unemployment and inadequate job growth is seen as acceptable by policymakers (at least those not up for re-election this November)? It’s one thing to recognize that we are working through a painful hangover after a private sector borrowing binge that […]

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Banks Already Moving to Evade Volcker Rule

Although it was unclear how the high concept behind the Volcker rule would translate into legislation, we had doubts from the get-go. The idea is sound: firms that are ultimately playing with government money should be involved only in socially valuable transaction intermediation and fundraising (and all major dealers around the world are backstopped, pretenses […]

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David Harvey: Crises of Capitalism

This is a wonderful short video by RSAnimate based on a talk by radical, as in Marxist, sociologist David Walker. For those who recoil, Marx was the first to take note of the propensity of capitalism towards instability. By contrast, neoclassical economics, which has dominated policymaking in advanced economies, posits that economies have a propensity […]

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Time to Investigate Blankfein and Paulson (More AIG Shenanigans Edition)

The New York Times has unearthed a damning tidbit about the bailout of AIG: When the government began rescuing it from collapse in the fall of 2008 with what has become a $182 billion lifeline, A.I.G. was required to forfeit its right to sue several banks — including Goldman, Société Générale, Deutsche Bank and Merrill […]

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Richard Smith: Did We Wind Up With Any Reform of the Shadow Banking System?

By Richard Smith, a London-based capital markets IT consultant In my last post, “Tracking the Rabbit through the Anaconda” , I mocked Geithner a bit and promised you all a spot of moaning about what’s missing from the financial reform bill. Well, the anaconda has now had the time it needed to produce its offering. […]

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Misnamed Financial Services “Reform” Bill Passes, Systemic Risk is Alive and Well

I want the word “reform” back. Between health care “reform” and financial services “reform,” Obama, his operatives, and media cheerleaders are trying to depict both initiatives as being far more salutary and far-reaching than they are. This abuse of language is yet another case of the Obama Adminsitration using branding to cover up substantive shortcomings. […]

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