Reader EmilianoZ pointed to a key section of a review of the documentary, “Page One: Inside the New York Times,” by Chris Hedges, who worked at the Times for 15 years. This is one of the best short summaries I’ve seen of the Faustian pact elite organizations (at least American ones) expect their members to enter into. From TruthDig:
Read more...No wonder Bank of New York was so eager to roll the investors to whom it is nominally responsible and sign up for a settlement deal in which it effectively sold their interests out (and didn’t bother even going through the motions of advance notice, much the less consultation). Bank of America not only used the carrot of a very juicy indemnification, it had the stick of the amount of RMBS trustee business it has directed to Bank of New York and presumably could send elsewhere on future deals if it became displeased.
Read more...A petition filed by some unhappy investors on Tuesday raises some serious challenges to the so-called Bank of America mortgage settlement. The embattled bank hopes to shed liability for alleged misrepresentations made by Countrywide on loans sold in 530 mortgage trusts with $424 billion in par value. We said it was a bad deal for investors because, among other things, it included a very broad waiver of a very valuable right, that of being able to sue over so-called chain of title issues (in very crude terms, whether the parties to the deal did all the things they promised to do to convey the loans properly to the mortgage trust).
This action raises three sets of different issues: the conflicts of interest among the parties trying to push this deal through, the process used to finalize the deal, which this pleading contends were devised to give the other investors short shrift; and the inadequate amount of the settlement, not only for parties that have tried to move their own putback litigation forward, but arguably for all parties.
Read more...Readers new to this site may be unfamiliar with our summer reruns, in which we reprise vintage NC posts that we think have stood the test of time pretty well.
We’ve done these more or less in chronological order (our last one was our post on the unveiling of the TARP), but we decided to skip ahead to one in 2010 because it focuses on a crucial bit of history that is too often overlooked, and were were reminded of it by a very good Frank Rich piece in New York Magazine on Obama’s failure to bring bankers to account.
Even Rich’s solid piece treats Obama more kindly that he should be. He depicts the President as too easily won over by “the best and the brightest) in the guise of folks like Robert Rubin and his protege Timothy Geithner.
We think this characterization is far too charitable. Obama had a window in time in which he could have acted, decisively, to rein the financial services in, and he and his aides chose to let it pass and throw their lot in with the banksters. That fatal decision has severely constrained their freedom of action, as we explain below.
Read more...Andrew Sheng, Chief Adviser to the China Banking Regulatory Commission, is wonderfully straightforward and realistic for an economist. He is willing to say, as he does in this video, things that are obvious yet somehow unacceptable to ‘fess up to in policy circles, like the planet simply cannot support 3 billion people in Asia living European lifestyles. He warns of the danger of creating the mother of all crises if governments cannot stem the tide of leveraged capital flows, and also discusses the role of China on the global stage.
Read more...Jon Daniellsson of the LSE has spotted something odd about the Basel III debate on capital levels…
Read more...By Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive
Barron’s published a detailed take down of the mortgage insurance industry weekend that highlights how Treasury’s approach to the mortgage mess will ultimately make matters worse. As the article points out, in the fairly likely scenario that mortgage claims exceed the amount of capital the insurers have available to pay them, the parties taking the biggest hit will be Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That means taxpayers are probably on the hook for more bailouts.
Despite having questionable capital reserves for the future claims they face, mortgage insurers are still continuing to write significant insurance business. Why would anybody want to continue to buy insurance from such shaky companies?
The continuing business of the mortgage insurers help shed light on the fact that virtually the entire mortgage industry is run through zombie companies that ought to have expired years ago.
Read more...A recent post by Ezra Klein, “What ‘Inside Job’ got wrong,” manages the impressive feat of being spectacularly off base, rhetorically dishonest, and embarrassingly revealing of the lack of a moral compass all at once.
Since being off base is a major part of Klein’s brand, I suppose one should not be surprised; those who’ve had the good fortune to have limited contact with his output can read Jon Walker’s “Ezra Klein: Insurance Exchanges Don’t Work and Must be Expanded Dramatically,” or Physicians for a National Health Care Program’s “Does Ezra Klein really think ‘managed care didn’t kill anyone’?” for two of many examples.
I’m going to shred this piece in some detail, first, because it will be entertaining, and second, I hope that it will encourage readers to take a cold, bloodyminded look at the excuses made for malfeasance in our elites.
Read more...If you had any doubts that the US has become a corpocracy, two fresh rulings by the Supreme Court should seal any doubt. They are stunningly bad, in that they reduce or gut the reach of well-settled law over large companies, to the degree that it will take very little in the way of effort for companies to organize their affairs so as to escape liability for their actions in areas that affect large numbers of citizens.
The through line in both rulings is the creative and selective use of the notion of corporate “personhood”. That personhood has been the basis for the extension of a whole raft of rights to corporations, including, perversely, the Constitutional right of free speech. Yet the same notion which has been used to confer privileges that companies lack in other countries is at the same time being construed so as to vitiate accountability, when ordinary people find it mighty hard to escape the consequences of their actions. I’m certain the Founding Fathers, who were wary of concentrated power, would be spinning in their graves at the logic and effect of recent decisions on this front.
Read more...It’s a sign of the times that your humble blogger is having to create finely stratified typologies for the various types of propaganda dubious research being deployed to promote the idea that rule by our new financial overlords, despite the considerable evidence to the contrary, really is for our own good.
We’ve already instituted the Frederic Mishkin Iceland Prize for Intellectual Integrity for special-interest-group- favoring PR masquerading as research.
However, Mishkin is a Respected Personage, and the initial Mishkin Iceland Prize recipients, Charles Calomiris, Eric Higgins, and Joe Mason, presumably knew they were writing utter bunk and were handsomely compensated for attaching their names to less than credible arguments. That suggests we need a separate category for the more mundane, bread-and-butter shilldom that is dressed up to look like serious academic work. Let’s call it the Lobsters Really Want to be Your Dinner Prize.
Read more...Since we so seldom have positive news to report on NC, we thought it was important to highlight a promising development. Senator Richard Durbin has introduced legislation that would considerably complicate the effort of Wall Street players to pillage privatize state and government assets for fun and profit.
It is key to understand what a bad deal these transactions are for ordinary citizens
Read more...Yves here. I’ve been looking for simple, practical ideas on what can be done to stem what seems to be a hopeless slide downward in our standards of conduct. I’d be interested to get reader reactions, particularly if any of you were in organizations that had sanctions that were implemented along these lines.
By James Andreoni, Professor of Economics, University of California, San Diego and Laura Katherine Gee, graduate student in Economics, University of California San Diego. Cross posted from VoxEU
How should a small organisation – a firm, a university, a sports team – encourage good behaviour? While punishment can often make things worse, this column proposes and tests a method the authors call the “hired gun”. By punishing only the worst offender, everyone is given an incentive to be the second-worst offender. If everyone follows that strategy, good behaviour soon follows.
Read more...Matt Stoller, the former senior policy aide to Alan Grayson, wrote an op ed for Politico, “Public pays price for privatization,” on infrastructure transactions. We’ve depicted this troubling trend as “tantamount to selling the family china only to have to rent it back in order to eat dinner.”
Stoller looks at the political consensus that in an earlier era was gung ho to build major public assets and now would rather rip fees from them by hocking them to investors:
Read more...This INET video focuses on how Ireland got into its mess as well as the domestic and international political dynamics as to how it is being resolved. There is an interesting tension between the cool talking head style and some of the coded descriptions of the stresses and the stark choices at hand.
Read more...I’m surprised that my post, “Bribes Work: How Peterson, the Enemy of Social Security, Bought the Roosevelt Name” has created a bit of a firestorm within what passes for the left wing political blogosphere. It has elicited responses from Andy Rich of the Roosevelt Institute, Roosevelt Institute fellow Mike Konczal, as well as two groups only mentioned in passing in the piece, the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
They all illustrate the famed Upton Sinclair quote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.” And so it is not surprising that all of them engaged in straw man attacks and failed to engage the simple point of the post: if you have a clear purpose and vision, you do not engage in activities that represent the polar opposite of what you stand for.
These “the lady doth protest too much” reactions reveal how naked careerism has eroded what little remains of the liberal cause in the US.
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