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. The Fed has recently come under heavy criticism, largely for its role in the AIG bailout. The Fed deserves […]
Read more...Ben Bernanke’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee for his reappointment as Fed chairman is scheduled for this Thursday. When CEOs preside over disasters, they are fired. Captains go down with their ships. And Bernanke needs to be replaced. He was a major architect of the policies that created the crisis. He ignored signs […]
Read more...In a sign that the Federal Reserve is circling the wagons, chairman Ben Bernanke has an op-ed in the Washington Post that attempts to defend the central bank’s role. What is interesting is how much the tables have turned. The Obama effort to make the Fed into the uber bank regulator has become a rout, […]
Read more...For the record, zero is a very impressive achievement, so we have to give the Treasury department credit where credit is due. From Bloomberg: More than 650,994 loan revisions had been started through the Obama administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program as of last month, from about 487,081 as of September, according to the Treasury. None […]
Read more...Yesterday, I went after two targets in one post. The primary one was Andrew Ross Sorkin, who despite the considerable reporting and storytelling skills he demonstrated in Too Big Too Fail, seemed unable to keep a heavy-handed pro-Fed posture out of an article yesterday on the Paul-Grayson-DeMint bill, which more popularly goes by monickers like […]
Read more...Note: this post is by Thomas Adams, at Paykin Krieg and Adams, LLP, and a former managing director at Ambac and FGIC, with some minor additions by yours truly. This is a significant piece of some puzzles he, some other experts who prefer to remain anonymous, and I have been pushing on for several months. […]
Read more...Full disclosure: I love Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail and think everyone should read it. But having said that, Sorkin has spent a bit too much time running with the big dogs. In today’s piece in the New York Times, he hones in on an amendment added to the Paul/Grayson bill passed last […]
Read more...This clip is from an interview with blogger Mike Stark. Apologies for the poor sound quality. While Dodd indicates that he is “inclined to be supportive” of Bernanke, he is surprisingly cautious about making a broader statement, a sign of a shift in sentiment.
Read more...Reader Doug Smith was not happy with an article in the Christian Science Monitor yesterday, titled, “Does US need a second stimulus to create jobs? His remarks: Could you, Edward or someone consider reading this article and responding to it? My sense is that it perfectly captures ‘conventional wisdom’ and, in that sense, is a […]
Read more...The knives are starting to come out. DeFazio claims the discontent among the progressive wing has become acute. The Democratic Congressmen who have a operating brain cell know the considerable failings of Obama’s economic policies will be visited on them unless serious corrective action is taken in pretty short order. And that won’t happen with […]
Read more...So get this, sports fans: the day (or maybe two max) before the so-called Audit the Fed bill (a bipartisan initiative to increase transparency) has a torpedo shot at it by a member of the House Financial Services committee, one Mel Watt of North Carolina. Of course, his amendment professes to increase transparence too, but […]
Read more...Dear sports fans, your humble blogger, along with a ton of others, got the not-very-embargoed copy of the SIGTARP report on the New York Fed’s conduct with respect to its full payout on AIG’s credit default swaps to its counterparties. The press is treating the report as if it was tough. I was sputtering with […]
Read more...When has a bureaucrat every wanted to give up on a big slush fund? Particularly one with no strings attached? What is heinous about the discussion of Treasury’s plan to argue that it should have its authority under the TARP extended is the failure to include some of the most basic and troubling issues. First, […]
Read more...The theater is starting to get interesting. Here in the US we have banker pay theater masquerading as the real thing. Kenneth Feinberg, the so-called pay-czar, struggles to collect a few scalps at the handful of TARP institutions under his domain, with the ever-intransigent AIG making headlines. This of course is meant to distract attention […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0. Oh dear, there he goes again. After sensibly calling for a jobs summit to deal with the problem of rising unemployment, President Obama’s Herbert Hoover-like alter ego has re-emerged again to warn us again about the evils of government deficit […]
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