What is CalPERS trying to hide? The pension fund sweetly professes that we should have the data we’ve asked for, but won’t provide it. It’s latest move shows how deeply it is committed to scorched-earth strategies in dealing with us.
Read more...It is student loan week in the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Warren’s bill to refinance prior loans to the current 3.86% rate (including private loans owned by the likes of Sallie Mae), gets a vote on Wednesday. Yesterday, the President endorsed that bill, and threw in his own executive memorandum to, as the White House puts it, “make student loans more affordable.” Today, Obama will show up on Tumblr to further make the sale.
Read more...Larry Summers, like Tim Geithner, wants the public to believe that rescuing banks and leaving citizens to rot was the right crisis response. But neither experts, nor people who followed the crisis, nor voters at large are buying what Team Obama is trying to sell.
Read more...SEC chairman Mary Jo White made clear in a new speech that she’s not going to do much about high frequency trading.
SEC chairman Mary Jo White spoke on Thursday about high frequency trading. She made clear that she not going to do much to curb it but will engage in more studies so as to look to be Doing Something.
Read more...The ECB is expected to cross a Rubicon today by implementing negative deposit rates. What is the impact likely to be?
Read more...Obama’s climate plan encourages electrical plants to convert from coal to natural gas, completely ignoring methane as a potent greenhouse gas.
Read more...Yet more live connections between New Zealand companies and international organized crime, plus some Panama and Switzerland, too
Read more...A revealing image, and more investigation of KKR’s all-too-clever wordsmithing strongly indicate its claim that KKR Capstone is not an affiliate does not stand up to scrutiny. This is a serious charge because if the critics are right, KKR is embezzling.
Read more...Yves here. Ilargi is duly skeptical of the enthusiastic financial press response to an increase in home equity liquidation, um, borrowing using home equity lines of credit, or Helocs. While the party line is that this development reflects an rise in home equity and increased consumer confidence, Ilargi stresses that prices appreciation that the Fed has created, the Fed can also take away. I have to wonder how many of these Heloc borrowers are doing so out of necessity or near-desperation.
Read more...Yves here. This post is an interesting “be careful what you wish for” warning as far as the legalization of marijuana is concerned.
Read more...Yves here. I’m highlighting this post for a basic reason: there’s a lot of cynicism about regulation. Many Americans have bought the right-wing line that regulations can’t work. But here, whether by accident or design, a reform program at a key bank regulator, the OCC, is going off the rails due to bad strategic choices.
Read more...Private equity firms invest in companies, yet the limited partners in the overwhelming majority of funds can’t see their financial statements. And there’s good reason to be concerned.
Read more...How did supposedly sophisticated limited partners let themselves enter into contracts with private equity firms that are actually pretty one-sided?
Read more...The sorry tale of the supposedly restored Spanish zombie bank Catalunya Caixa.
Read more...We’ve published 12 private equity limited partnership agreements, including the KKR limited partnership agreement that was key to an important Wall Street Journal story. The source documents have been removed from the Pennsylvania Treasury’s website, so our document trove has now become the best source for these records.
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