Category Archives: Regulations and regulators

Obama Administration Muzzling Its Climate Scientists

Yves here. The fact that Team Obama is gagging its climate scientists should come as no surprise. First, the Administration is obsesses with secrecy and image-management, as its extremely aggressive posture on classifying records and prosecuting leakers attests. Second, Administration climate policy is founded on a Big Lie. As Gaius Publius has written at length, its greenhouse gas measures exclude methane, the most potent greenhouse gas. That omission favors fracking, which fails the “clean green” test when you factor in methane releases. And that’s before you factor in contamination of water supplies.

Please Sign Urgent Occupy the SEC Petition Against Derivatives Deregulation

Text and links from Occupy the SEC follow:

Dear Friends,

This bulletin contains an update on what Occupy the SEC (occupythesec.org) has been up to lately, and what you can do to get involved.

Congress is on the verge of deregulating derivatives TODAY – Sign our petition to stop them.

Congress has historically used the end of the year as an opportunity to pass controversial legislation with little publicity, often using amendments to unrelated bills. This year is no different.

TODAY (December 10, 2014) our legislators are on the verge of approving two key provisions that would significantly roll back crucial parts of the Dodd-Frank Act’s derivatives (swaps) restrictions. Those provisions are Section 630 of the Senate Amendment to H.R. 83 (Omnibus Bill) and Title III of the House’s current version of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2014 (TRIA).

These provisions are nothing more than an attempt by Wall Street lobbyists and their friends in Congress to eviscerate important derivatives reforms implemented by the Dodd-Frank Act.

We need YOU to contact your legislators as soon as possible and tell them that you OPPOSE these sneaky deregulatory moves. If passed, these provisions would pave the way for further gutting of Dodd-Frank, which in turn would surely jeopardize our nation’s economy, line the pockets of wealthy financiers, and damage the fiscal health of every day Americans.

Please sign our petition now by clicking on the following link, which will allow you to send automatic emails to your Congressional Representative and Senators.

http://www.petition2congress.com/17017/petition-against-11th-hour-dilution-dodd-frank/

Elizabeth Warren Escalates Fight over Treasury Nominee Antonio Weiss, Goes to War with Wall Street Wing of Democratic Party

Earlier this week, we wrote about how the New York Times’ Dealbook, the creature of Wall Street sycophant Andrew Ross Sorkin, had launched a fierce campaign against Elizabeth Warren’s latest move, her opposition to the Obama administration’s nomination of Lazard’s Antonio Weiss, a mergers and acquisitions banker. Warren’s grounds for objecting to Weiss were straightforward: his experience was no fit for the requirements of his proposed Treasury role. On top of that, he had been involved in and therefore profited from acquisitions called inversions that Treasury opposes because they reduce the taxes paid by the acquirer, which uses the acquired company to move its headquarters to a lower-tax jurisdiction.

Dealbook published three Warren-bashing columns in as many weeks; the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal ran editorials making similar arguments, suggesting that all were picking up on the same talking points out of Treasury. One tell: the Times had to issue a correction on one of its pieces because it relied on a Treasury document that exaggerated Weiss’ accomplishments.

Warren upped the ante in a speech on Tuesday, making Weiss, who is now head of investment banking at Lazard, a symbol of what is wrong with the relationship between the government and Big Finance: that of far too much coziness between the large, influential players and financial regulators. And in sharpening and further documenting her critique, she has put the Robert Rubin wing of the Democratic party in her crosshairs.

Jeffrey Sachs Channeled His Inner Bill Black – and Obama and Holder Ignored Him Too

Yves here. This post by Bill Black serves to illustrate the difficulties of effecting change. As much as Black in particular has been a forceful and articulate advocate for tougher bank regulation and prosecution of executives, arguments like his get at most polite lip service from the enforcers. Recall that Black is far from alone. Others who’ve called for a more tough-minded approach include Charles Ferguson of Inside Job, Eliot Spitzer, Neil Barofsky, Joe Stiglitz and Simon Johnson.

We are seeing more and more of the elite willing call for more aggressive measures to combat bank misconduct.

Bill Black: Mortgage Appraisal Fraud is Baaack…Because Bank Execs Profit From It

Yves here. Financiers and their media amplifiers keep trying to blame their bad conduct, like mortgage appraisal fraud, on powerless customers, so people like Bill Black have to keep swatting down their misrepresentations. Sadly, this crisis topic is back all too soon due to lack of regulatory vigilance.

Chicago Public Schools’ $100 Million Swaps Debacle Demonstrates High Cost of High Finance

I’ve been late to write up an important series published by the Chicago Tribune earlier this month on a costly swaps misadventure by the Chicago Public Schools. Like all too many state and local government entities, the Chicago Public Schools were persuaded to obtain $1 billion of needed ten-year financing not through the time-and-tested route of a simple ten year bond sale but the supposedly cost-saving mechanism of issuing a floating-rate bond and swapping it into a fixed rate. An impressive, expert-vetted analysis of the deal by the Chicago Tribune estimated that the school authority has in fact incurred $100 million in present-value losses on that $1 billion bond issue.

Bill Black: The New York Times Thinks Jailing Banksters Would Cause a “Bind”

Yves here. Bill Black continues to heap well-deserved scorn on efforts to defend New York Fed president William Dudley’s revealing performance in Senate testimony last week. In its efforts to pretend that the New York Fed can’t possibly be expected to regulate, the Grey Lady goes beyond the usual hoary canard that jailing banksters is just too hard (as in trying to say that what they perpetrated didn’t break any laws, when plenty of writers, such as Charles Ferguson, long form in Predator Nation, and yours truly, among plenty of others, have cited both legal theories and fact sets that show the reverse). The additional bogus claim is….drumroll…that keeping banks out of criminal and improper conduct is somehow inconsistent with making sure they “operate successfully”. In other words, the Times is effectively saying that banks have become so dependent on criminal and near-criminal conduct as profit sources that regulators dare not deprive them of that out of fear of weakening their financial performance.

Paul Martin, A Regulator Who Said No to Banks

Paul Martin, who was Canada’s finance minister before he became prime minister, is widely seen as implementing the policies that led Canada to get through the crisis virtually unscathed. This is the summary of Martin’s key actions as finance minister from INET: In general, Martin has received justifiable plaudits but often for the wrong thing. […]

Big Investors Rebelling Against Private Equity Fees

In a remarkable and long-overdue change in attitude, institutional investors are starting to tell private equity titans that they think they don’t earn their outsized pay. And that’s before you get to all the grifting they’ve been exposed to be doing on top of that.

The Wall Street Journal described a confrontation at a conference in Paris, with a pension fund manager responsible overseeing private equity investments calling out the unjustifiable level of private equity fees.

Bill Black: Dudley Do Wrong Rejects Being a “Cop” and Embraces “Foaming the Runways”

William Dudley, the President of the New York Fed, is not a stupid man. He is, however, wholly unfit to be a regulator. He has now admitted that publicly. It is time for him to return to Goldman Sachs so that he can be replaced by someone expressly chosen to be a vigorous regulator who will embrace the most critical function of a financial regulator – to be the tough “regulatory cop on the beat.”

Elizabeth Warren Blasts New York Fed President William Dudley

This Elizabeth Warren grilling of New York Fed William Dudley over the revelations in tapes made by ex-New York Fed employee Carmen Segarra, is a bit more Socratic than her normal approach, presumably because she has more than the typical five minutes for questions. Don’t be deceived by her pacing.

Bill Black: Why the New York Fed Isn’t Trustworthy

Yves here. Readers may recall that we criticized the New York Times’ reporting on an important story on a criminal investigation underway involving both Goldman and New York Fed employees. A Goldman employee who had worked at the New York Fed and his boss were fired because the ex-Fed staffer allegedly had obtained confidential bank supervisory information. A New York Fed employee was also fired immediately after the Goldman terminations. The piece was composed as if the intent was to be as uninformative as possible and still meet the Grey Lady’s writing standards. Readers were left in the dark as to where the two Goldman employees fit in the organization and what the sensitive information was.

Bill Black dug through later news reports, did some additional sleuthing, and based on is experience as a regulator, concluded that there is no way the Goldman employee, Rohit Bansal, didn’t recognize that he was misusing confidential bank supervisory information. That matters because whether or not breach is criminal hinges on whether he “willfully” broke the law.

Private Equity Firms Start ‘Fessing Up to Cheating

The Wall Street Journal describes how some private equity firms are attempting to clean up their act by admitting to dubious practices in revised regulatory filings with the SEC.

There’s a wee problem with this approach. Securities law is not like the Catholic Church, where confession and a promise not to sin again buys you redemption.

New York Fed, Goldman in Criminal Investigation for Sharing Confidential Information

A New York Times story manages to bury the lead, even given the salacious material, in an important story that provides more evidence of the overly-cozy relationship between the New York Fed and its favored large banks, particularly Goldman. The issue is sensitive in the wake of former New York Fed staffer Carmen Segarra releasing hours of tape recordings that show undue deference by the Fed employees towards Goldman. One particularly troubling incident was the Fed allowing Goldman to pretend it had gotten Fed approval for a derivatives deal designed to snooker Spanish banking regulators. Another was Goldman’s lack of a conflicts of interest policy (see former regulator Justin Fox’s discussion of why this is a serious matter).

What is striking about the New York Times expose is how tortuous the writing is, and how it takes (and I am not exaggerating) three times as many words as necessary to finally describe what happened. For instance, it isn’t until the 9th paragraph that the article mentions that this sharing of confidential information can be a crime and the authorities are giving a serious look into that very question.

But the really damaging part is it looks as if Goldman waited to take action on its having obtained impermissible information until the Carmen Segarra story with secret tapes of how the New York Fed toadied to Goldman broke when they could finally see how damaging it actually was. And Goldman and the Fed clearly knew that story was coming weeks in advance.

Elizabeth Warren Blasts FHFA’s Mel Watt: “You Haven’t Helped a Single Family”

Elizabeth Warren tore into FHFA director Mel Watt over his failure to develop a program for Fannie and Freddie to provide principal modifications to underwater borrowers at risk of foreclosure. She also got in a dig for his failure to stop the agencies from pursuing deficiency judgments. That means going after former homeowners when the sale of the house they lost didn’t recoup enough to cover the mortgage balance. In the stone ages, when banks kept the mortgage loans they made, they never pursued deficiency judgements. They knew there was no point in trying to get blood from a turnip. Not surprisingly, the sadistic Fannie/Freddie policy has also proven to be spectacularly unproductive in financial terms. An FHFA inspector general study found that recoveries were less than 1/4 of 1% of the amount sought. Moreover, since those mortgage balances were often inflated by junk fees and other dubious costs, and mortgage servicers have done a poor job of maintain properties (they are too often stripped of copper and appliances, or get mold), any deficiency might be significantly or entirely the servicer’s fault.