It’s easy to be cynical about the state of bank regulations, since the regulators themselves have for the most part been badly captured by the industry. So it’s important to give them credit when they take a meaningful step in the right direction.
Read more...Susan Beck at American Lawyer (hat tip Abigail Field) has managed to get an inside view of what was going on at the SEC when it launched its case against Goldman and a Goldman vice president, Fabrice Tourre, over a Goldman CDO called Abacus that went spectacularly bad. So was the SEC corrupt or merely incompetent?
Read more...Today, two stories broke on the SEC’s activities in private equity, one in Bloomberg, another in Reuters, and they look to be based on authorized leaks. Together, they suggest that the SEC, which obtained new oversight authority for private equity firms under Dodd Frank, has been turning over rocks and found so many creepy-crawlies that even the normally complacent agency felt compelled to take notice.
Read more...Robert Cowley, CEO of fake bank Investment Suisse, goes to jail for fraud
Read more...In Flash Boys, Michael Lewis has again launched a book that hews to his established formula: colorful outsiders take on a big bad entrenched establishment and win. Even though Lewis seems assured of having yet another best-seller, this book is getting more criticism than his works usually do. Put it this way: when commentators as diverse as Felix Salmon, Matt Levine, and Pam Martens feel compelled to object, it looks like Lewis has overfitted this tale to his blockbuster formula.
Read more...The yawning gap between private equity landlord sales talk and what they are delivering is finally being exposed.
Read more...Under the odd conventions of journalism, if someone else writes about a topic, especially if it resembles a “scoop,” nobody else can write about it. So if you go down the road for a week or so chasing a story and then you see it in your friendly neighborhood copy of The Huffington Post, you can basically stop chasing. Thanks for taking food out of my mouth, HuffPo!
But in this case, the complicated story in question warrants more attention, because it’s a really good lesson in how “lobbying” incorporates more than just paying rich people in suits to sweet-talk politicians and regulators. This is the darker side of lobbying, with the venerated “small business owners” everyone loves to deify caught in the crossfire.
Read more...I once had a good opinion of bank analyst Chris Whalen, despite having some reservations about him. But his error-filled screed against mortgage servicing regulations means he can no longer be taken seriously on the subject of banking. Whalen has become a textbook illustration of the Upton Sinclair saying, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Read more...This is a welcome bit of good news. Countries are finally standing up for the rule of law over rule by multinational corporation.
Read more...Never underestimate the willingness of banks to find new and creative ways to cheat customers, particularly when big bucks are at stake.
Read more...We told readers earlier this month that the IRS was well-nigh certain to deem Bitcoin to be property, not a currency, and that would deter its use in commerce. We got pushback from Bitcoin defenders, who tried several lines of argument, basically along the lines of “digital currencies are inevitable” and “the tax authorities are irrelevant”. Today, the IRS issued a release that states that it regards Bitcoin as tradeable property, which will make it cumbersome to use it in commercial transactions.
Read more...The old saying is “better late than never,” but as we hope to demonstrate, the SEC is awfully late to take an interest in collateralized loan obligations. The problems it has gotten curious about now were discernible years ago. And the failure to take interest until now means that misbehavior that was discussed in the press during the crisis is almost certain to go unpunished, since the statute of limitations for securities law violations has passed.
Read more...We’ve argued that the notion that companies are obligated to maximize shareholder value is a theory made up by economists and eagerly adopted by corporate executives, with little to no foundation in law. We received confirmation of our thesis in the form of a Columbia Law Review article by the chief justice in Delaware, Leo Strine, arguing that shareholder activism needs to be curbed. As if CEOs are really breaking a sweat over those pesky shareholders.
Read more...Yesterday, the National Mortgage Settlement monitor, Joseph Smith, released his final crediting reports, confirming that all five banks (Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan Chase and Ally, now known after bankruptcy as Residential Capital, or ResCap) have now satisfied the consumer relief portion of the foreclosure fraud settlement. The banks were required to spend $20 billion in “credited” relief (some actions received less than a dollar-for-dollar credit). Smith exults that the gross relief provided totaled over $50 billion, and that “more than 600,000 families received some form of relief.”
What the mainstream media reports on this don’t tell you is that the $50 billion number is wildly inflated: for example, it includes $12 billion in deficiency waivers in non-recourse states, which the IRS confirmed have no value whatsoever. But I didn’t know just how inflated these numbers were, and how empty the promises, until I went through them.
Read more...As the Obama administration negotiates new trade agreements with European and Pacific nations, a battle has emerged over the agreements’ egregious rules that grant giant corporations unreasonable powers to subvert democracy. These rules, dubbed “investor rights” by the corporations, allow firms to sue governments over actions—including public interest regulations—that reduce the value of their investments.
Oxfam, the Institute for Policy Studies, and four other non-profits are releasing a new study that explains why these rules are so dangerous to democracy and the environment. We are among the co-authors of this study, titled “Debunking Eight Falsehoods by Pacific Rim Mining/OceanaGold in El Salvador.” The report offers a powerful case study of everything that is wrong with this corporate assault on democracy.
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