Category Archives: Regulations and regulators

Unsealed Documents Reveal Former White House Officials Violated Fannie/Freddie Conservatorship Rules, Apparently to Advance Bank-Enriching “Reforms”

The Administration has refused to turn over over 12,000 documents in a lawsuit against how the government operated Fannie and Freddie in their conservatorship. The major bone of contention is that Treasury stripped them of all profits, which damaged the remaining private shareholders. But the unsealing of a small batch of government records shows why […]

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SEC Official Defends Weak, Selective Enforcement When Agency Records Show Private Equity Firms Thumb Nose at Agency

Yesterday, we looked at a section of a Stanford Law School conference at the end of March. The panel on pre-IPO funding included the SEC/s head of enforcement, Andrew Ceresney. In the question and answer section, Ceresney and a member of the audience, Marc Fagel, the former regional director of the SEC’s San Francisco office, […]

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After Distancing Herself From Bill Clinton’s Economic Policies, Hillary Wants Him as Mr. Economic Fix It

Like the Bourbons, the Clintons appear to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

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Satyajit Das: “Stay in the Name of Reform” – The Fed and ISDA’s Derivative Bankruptcy Initiative

Why a proposal to “stay” derivatives termination in the event of bank bankruptcy is inconsequential and avoids bigger questions about the use of derivatives and failure to rein in risks in this market.

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Michael Hudson: Warning to Europe – How the TTIP Threatens Public Health Care and Pensions

Why the TTIP poses a wide-ranging threat to European health and pension policies.

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Where is Amy Klobuchar? How Democratic Indifference is Squandering a Unique Moment on Antitrust Policy

It’s been a good few weeks for opponents of further market concentration. Oil services firms Halliburton and Baker Hughes called off their merger amid a Justice Department lawsuit. New rules on corporate inversions led to an abandonment of the Pfizer-Allergan merger. The White House issued a directive to federal agencies to take steps to foster competition, with an opening salvo of ending the monopoly of cable set-top boxes. The Economist, of all places, started agitating for increased competition amid record corporate profits. The antitrust movement, in short, has gone mainstream.

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Lessons from Iceland, Where Offshore Created an Onshore Bubble Free of Rules and Regulations

In Iceland, the rapid growth of offshore, meaning tax evasion, along with harmful, even criminal, practices produced a massive boom and bust.

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