The Rise of the Right Wing Populist: Blame It on the Banks
Contrary to popular belief, the shift to the right is not due to immigration as much as the financial crisis and its aftermath.
Read more...Category Archives: Regulations and regulators
Obama Administration Trying to Throw Massive Secrecy Veil Over Past and Future Pilfering of Fannie and Freddie
Why is the government insisting that a huge stash of Fannie and Freddie records deserve state secret treatment?
Read more...Greece-Troika Train Wreck Shaping Up for July Despite IMF Leak
As hard as it seems to believe, the IMF is shaping up as a less bad actor in the continuing Greece austerity saga. Germany finance minister Wolfgang Schauble, by contrast, seems emboldened by Merkel’s fallen stature, which couldn’t come at a worse time for Greece.
Read more...Bill Black: Andrew Ross Sorkin Makes a Hash of Met Life “Too Big to Fail” Decision
Andrew Ross Sorkin yet again misinforms readers, to the benefit of Big Finance.
Read more...Five Big Banks Get Bad Grades on Living Wills, No One Gets Clean Pass; Admission That “Too Big to Fail” is Alive and Well
The practical and political consequences of no big banks getting a pass on their living wills.
Read more...Bill Black: “Liberal” Economists Cheered the New Democrats’ Deregulation of Finance
A case study illustrating how soi-disant liberal economists pushed the US to the right during the Clinton Administration.
Read more...Martin Wolf Defends Central Banks’ Negative Interest Rate Policies
The Financial Times’ lead economics writer, Martin Wolf, makes an intellectually bogus case for negative interest policies.
Read more...Krugman Kinda, Sorta Retracts a Key Part of Last Friday’s ‘Sanders Over the Edge’ Op-ed
Being Paul Krugman means never having to say you’re sorry.
Read more...Housing’s “Deadly Embrace” in Financial Cycles
The IMF argues that regulating mortgages is not sufficient to prevent housing booms and busts.
Read more...Fed Suddenly Having Emergency Meetings as European Banks Also Wobble
The Fed is suddenly looking very nervous, and by contrast, the Europeans don’t seem anywhere nervous enough on the banking front.
Read more...Obama SEC Pick Lisa Fairfax in Limbo Because of Lack of Substance on Everything, Not Just Corporate Political Spending Disclosure
My initial understanding of the vacancies on the Securities and Exchange Commission was that the selection of Lisa Fairfax last October to replace Luis Aguilar as a Democratic commissioner represented a victory for the reform coalition in the Senate. In fact I’ve written as such. Covington & Burling lawyer Keir Gumbs was the clear choice of the Administration, but his work advising issuers and investors about corporate disclosure of political activities, which opponents defined as advising CEOs to hide their political spending, did him in. Fairfax, a law professor at George Washington University, was reportedly put forward by Sherrod Brown and placed on a list of acceptable nominees by Elizabeth Warren (there’s some question now of whether or not that was the case). Swapping Fairfax for Gumbs was reported as a win for the reformers.
So why did Democrats block her from advancing in the Senate Banking Committee, probably dooming her nomination?
Read more...#panamapapers Offshore Funds: On the Run With (Almost) Nowhere to Go?
The owners of offshore funds really might be seeing their comeuppance.
Read more...We Stopped Pfizer’s Tax Dodge, Now Let’s End the Buybacks
Why companies, particularly ones that get large taxpayer subsidies like Pfizer, should not be allowed to manipulate their stock prices thorough buybacks.
Read more...#panamapapers: Questioning the Picture Painted in the WSJ’s Interview With Jürgen Mossack
A sceptical look at Jürgen Mossack’s WSJ interview
Read more...Bill Black: The Myth that Obama’s Taking Huge Contributions from Wall Street Was Fine
The notion that Obama and Clinton weren’t influenced by large Wall Street donations is laughable.
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