Why Obamacare Cannot “Insure” for Pre-Existing Conditions
Why “insurance” for existing conditions is a bit of a misnomer, and why that matters in terms of health care policy.
Read more...Category Archives: Regulations and regulators
Will Opposition in the US and Overseas Derail the Toxic TransPacific Partnership?
Given the extreme measures the Obama Administration has gone to to keep the pending trade deal known as the TransPacific Partnership under wraps, it’s hard to be certain where things stand. But like the Administration’s failed effort to have the US intervene in Syria, this has the potential to be one of those rare cases where the interests of ordinary citizens prevails.
Read more...Volcker Rule: The Devil’s in the Unimpressive Enforcement Details
If you managed to be late to the Volcker Rule party, you can learn a great deal of what you’d need to know via the revealing contrast between two reasonably detailed accounts, one at Huffington Post by Shahien Nasiripour, the other by Matt Levine at Bloomberg. If you didn’t know better, you’d wonder if they were talking about the same rule.
Read more...Big Banks About to Start Booking Second Mortgage Losses They Can No Longer Extend and Pretend Away
Reuters has a new article, Insight: A new wave of U.S. mortgage trouble threatens, which is simultaneously informative and frustrating. It is informative in that it provides some good detail but it is frustrating in that it depicts a long-standing problem aided and abetted by regulators as new.
Read more...Whistleblower Describes How Private Equity Firms Flagrantly Violate SEC Broker-Dealer Requirements
Last week, Crain’s Business Daily and Fortune reported that a whistleblower has provided the SEC with evidence of massive, ongoing violations of securities laws, specifically, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, by several unnamed private equity firms.
Read more...Michael Olenick: Consumer Reports Joins Obama in Telling Obamacare Big Lies
After months of analysis I can objectively conclude that Obamacare is, to ordinary middle-class people, worse than worthless.
Read more...Elizabeth Warren Attacks Beltway Powerhouse Third Way as Fronting for Wall Street
Wow, the gloves are finally coming off.
Read more...Obamacare’s Drug Coverage Minefield
Now that the consumer front end of Healthcare.gov seems to be under control (the insurer interface is another matter), public attention is now shifting to the ultimately more important question of what benefits patients receive, and at what cost.
Read more...Ian Fraser: The “Financial Terrorism” of Royal Bank of Scotland
Yves here. This story of institutionalized pilferage of customer accounts hasn’t gotten the attention it warrants in the US. Even if you are pretty jaded about bank chicanery, I suspect you’ll find this account falls in the category of “no matter how bad you think it is, it’s worse.” And in this case, the victims aren’t the usual hapless retail customers, but businesses.
Read more...Obama Kept His Head in the Sand During Healthcare.gov Fiasco
The New York Times has an instructive account, Inside the Race to Rescue a Health Care Site, and Obama, of the scrambling in the Administration to deal with the beyond-redeption-by-the-power-of-spin disaster of the Healthcare.gov launch.
Read more...Governments Will Struggle to Control Bitcoin
Yves here. I was extremely puzzled to see various US regulators make cautiously positive remarks about Bitcoin in Congressional hearings. But I now have a guess as to what happened.
Read more...John Coffee on the SEC’s Bogus Enforcement Math
Coffee, a highly respected securities law professor as well as a frequent critic of regulators., he takes a hard look at the SEC’s claims that its performance has improved and finds them wanting.
Read more...Speculation About Whether the Fed Manipulates the Stock Market Becoming More Mainstream
Even during the pre-Lehman days of the financial crisis (yes, Virginia, there were three acute episodes before the Big One), blogs and professional investors in my various e-mail conversations would discuss the idea that the Fed had a “plunge protection team” which would intervene to stem market routs.
Read more...Bob Goodwin: Why Code is Law
Several bellwether software initiatives have gone off the rails over the last five years. I am going to focus on one, because I learned about it on Naked Capitalism, and is where I first saw the expression “Code is Law”. I hope when history is written, this example will stand out on how the anarchist nerds that we call software engineers inadvertently started to hijack public institutions.
Read more...How a British Carbon Credit Pusher Got a Listing on a Danish Stock Exchange, Brokered by a New Zealand Financial Company Run by an Australian Residing in Switzerland
How a British Carbon Credit Pusher Got a Listing on a Danish Stock Exchange, Brokered by a New Zealand Financial Company Run by an Australian Residing in Switzerland
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