Category Archives: Federal Reserve

Tom Adams: Face to Face With Polished Wall Street Psychopathy (SEC Says that ICP Stole from My Old Company Edition)

By Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive When the financial crisis hit, I was in the direct line of fire. My company blew up very early in the crisis, giving me the dubious opportunity to see how bad things were going to get long before most of the rest of the world, including […]

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Mirabile Dictu! The Fed Criticizes Wall Street Pay Practices

The normally bank-friendly Fed fired an unexpected shot across the industry’s bow today, taking issue with its failure to take sufficiently tough measures to curb undue risk-taking. Per the Washington Post: The Federal Reserve has completed an initial review of compensation policies at 28 large banks it oversees and has been giving them confidential feedback […]

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Eurobank “Stress Test” Disclosure Likely to Increase Jitters

As we noted last week, Spain has forced the hand of other Eurozone bank regulators by declaring it will release the results of recent ECB stress tests, which earlier were to be published only on an aggregated basis, not bank by bank. There is still a good bit of confusion as to what happens next. […]

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CBO Issues Fed-Flattering Propaganda

I’ve seen some eye-poppin’, credulity-stretchin’ accounts in my time. The report “The Budgetary Impact and Subsidy Costs of the Federal Reserve’s Actions During the Financial Crisis,” just released by the Congressional Budget Office, ranks with the most extreme. It claims that the budgetary cost (which corresponds roughly to expected losses) of the Fed rescue facilities […]

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Why is Washington Dithering with Unemployment High?

Brad DeLong points out that Ronald Reagan was far more concerned about unemployment than Team Obama (or Washington generally) is, and also took far more aggressive measures to combat it. From The Week (hat tip reader Marshall): By the start of 1983, labor unions were frantically giving back previously-promised wage increases and offering wage cuts […]

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Economist Declares “Mission Accomplished” on Repairing Bank Balance Sheets

Reader Richard Smith provided a sighting of bank boosterism, courtesy The Economist: The happy secret of Western banking is that the system in aggregate now has lots of capital (see chart) relative to the net losses experienced over the crisis. The kind of erosion of capital forecast by the Federal Reserve’s stress tests last year, […]

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New Obama Administration Propaganda Tactic: Revisionist History

Wow, the Obama Administration is less than a year and a half old, and it’s already twiddling with the record. I was gobsmacked to see this section in a post by Felix Salmon today, on a new book by Jonathan Alter and a New York Magazine cover story by John Heilemann: Both Alter and Heilemann […]

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Mosler: Fed’s Currency Swaps – A Backdoor Way to Lower US Interest Rates

By Warren Mosler, a fund manager, co-founder and Distinguished Research Associate of The Center for Full Employment And Price Stability at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, and creator of the modern euro swap futures contract. Gillian Tett of the Financial Times wrote today about stress in the dollar funding markets, which she regards […]

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How Financial Reform Gets Done (Not)

Today provided yet another example of how the best government money can buy works. The Senate majority leader Harry Reid suffered an embarrassing defeat when his effort to pass a motion for cloture, which would have stopped debate on the financial reform bill, failed due to two Democrat and one Republican defection among the votes […]

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Would You Buy a Used Car From the Fed? (Maiden Lane Edition)

Would you believe the chairman of a financial firm who told you that he was going to be able to pay off his loans to you when: 1. The company was showing a not-negative net worth ONLY because it had marked down its loans on its accounting statements by 7.5%, even when the loan agreement […]

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The Fed Thumbs Its Nose at the Public

By Yves Smith and Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive The Fed and its friends and enablers in power, most recently Rahm Emanuel, are fighting tooth and nail to beat back the Audit the Fed amendments to pending financial reform legislation. That’s unfortunate and misguided. Even a cursory inspection of the Fed’s disclosures […]

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Greenspan Hid Fed Debate Over Housing Bubble to Keep Control

Ryan Grim at Huffington Post has parsed recently released transcripts of 2004 Fed Open Market Committee discussions that show the debate over the rapid rise in housing prices and concerns about global imbalances were downplayed at Greenspan’s insistence. For instance, the minutes reveal that Fed governor from Atlanta, Jack Guynn, was worried about signs of […]

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Is Geithner in SIGTARP’s Crosshairs?

A Bloomberg story today on Neil Barofsky, the head of the Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or SIGTARP, contained this explosive little item (hat tip Tom F): The TARP watchdog has also criticized Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner in reports and in congressional testimony for his handling of […]

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Guest Post: Will Policy Exits Just Be Revolving Doors?

By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. Both fiscal and monetary policymakers have said that they will begin to unwind the stimulative policy stances when the […]

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