Clinton Chasing Votes With Fracking U-Turn
Clinton’s fracking reversal will alienate the energy industry without appeasing environmentalists, since fracking produces methane and earthquakes.
Read more...Category Archives: Regulations and regulators
Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin: Corporate Fraud With a Body Count
Yves here. Some of the facts in this article are stunning. For instance, more Americans die from opoid overdose than from car accidents. And this article gives only a partial tally of Purdue Pharma’s predatory conduct. The drugmaker targeted overly-busy, not very well trained general practitioners in communities which were likely to have high incidence […]
Read more...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 […]
Read more...Reader Note on Strikes in France: “Pass the Popcorn”
Transportation unions and airport workers are joining strikes in France to protest new labor laws,….right before the Euro Cup and tourist season.
Read more...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, […]
Read more...SEC Conference Features Former Official Calling for Fraudsters to be Protected from Career Harm
No matter how bad you think things are at the SEC, you routinely find out that they are worse, as a recent conference revealed.
Read more...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.
Read more...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.
Read more...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.
Read more...Germany Blinks on Giving Debt Relief to Greece….or Did It?
Despite press reports to the contrary, in this year’s game of chicken over the Greek bailout, it looks like the IMF, and not Germany, blinked.
Read more...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.
Read more...The Minimum Wage Increases = Job Loss Myth
Repeat after me: study after study shows that minimum wages increases don’t lead to job losses.
Read more...TTIP: We Were Right All Along
The European Commission’s claim that the TTIP is aimed at ‘help[ing] people and businesses large and small” is shown to be a flagrant falsehood.
Read more...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.
Read more...Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to Put End to Mandatory Arbitration for Consumer Loans, Credit Cards
Ding, dong, the witch of mandatory arbitration is (on its way to being) dead.
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