Carbon Neutral Investments’ Trail of Disaster: How Carbon Credit Con Artists use Google Adwords to Work the Recovery Scam
Carbon Neutral Investments and the ‘recovery room’ scam
Read more...Category Archives: Regulations and regulators
The Careless Organizers of Gumball 3000 are Hooked Up with Boiler Room Scam “Servicers” Carbon Neutral Investments (CNI)
The Gumball 3000 event is helping a deeply dodgy British firm with its marketing.
Read more...FBI Raids, Lord Heseltine’s Haymarket Media Group, Financial Regulator “Crackdowns”, “What Car” Magazine…and Carbon Neutral Investments Limited
How two wide boys with shady pasts snared a leading British publisher that has major political connections.
Read more...The Glam and The Scam: Sauber Formula 1 Team and its Partner, Carbon Neutral Investments, Limited
The Sauber F1 team and their dodgy partners, Carbon Neutral Investments
Read more...How Novice Eco-Warrior Michael Bloomberg Ended up Looking as if he Endorses Carbon Credit Scams
Mayor Bloomberg stitched up by Italian Vogue and a dodgy financial firm: his image and words are being exploited to market carbon credit scams
Read more...Gretchen Morgenson on Bill Moyers: Ignore Those Crocodile Tears for JP Morgan
Yves here. Gretchen Morgenson gives an accessible presentation of why no one should feel sorry for the fact that JP Morgan is set to pay a roughly $13 billion settlement of a raft of mortgage-related liability. And she also dispatches the myth that the Department of Justice took a tough stance.
Read more...OCC Replies to Elizabeth Warren Reveal Extent of Regulatory Capture on Derivatives
I thought readers would have fun taking apart a reply by the Thomas Curry, the Comptroller of the Currency, to some written questions posed by Elizabeth Warren after a July 11 Senate Banking Committee hearing on systemic risk.
Read more...Bill Black: The New York Times Publishes the Most Ironic Sentence of the Crisis
Yves here. I enjoyed this piece by Bill Black because 1. Anyone who tries to pretend the Administration is serious about prosecuting bank-related fraud needs to be named and shamed and 2. I like the device of using a single sentence as the basis for a post.
Read more...Fed Gives Middle Finger to Congress, Commodities Customers, and Public, Proposes to Allow More Banks to Participate in Commodities Business
Nothing like watching a captured regulator like the Fed use a public hue and cry to execute a big bait and switch. Here the ploy is to change rules to further disadvantage the parties making complaints. But it takes finesse to make the finger in the eye look plausible and reasonable, so that when the well-understood bad effects show up later, the perp can pretend to be mystified.
Read more...Reps. Alan Grayson and John Conyers Call for End to Bank Welfare, Tough Rules on Bank Capital
Congressmen Alan Grayson and John Conyers have published a well-thought-out proposal on bank equity, with the objective of assuring that when banks do stupid things (which they do with great regularity, even before the era of casino banking, they’d embrace some new fad and run off the cliff together, like lemmings), they have enough capital to absorb losses. And that means a lot more capital than regulators are demanding they have now.
So I urge you to co-sign their letter (full text below) at http://nobankwelfare.com/.
Read more...Mirabile Dictu! Bank of America Found Guilty of Fraud for “Hustle” Mortgage Lending Program
Don’t get too excited.
Read more...The Ridiculous “Jamie Dimon as Victim” Meme on the Pending JP Morgan Mortgage Settlement
Nothing like having a credulous, leak-dependent media to carry your messages.
Read more...So How Big a Deal is the Pending “$13 Billion” JP Morgan Settlement?
One of the big news stories of the weekend is that JP Morgan and the Department of Justice, brokering a settlement of liability across multiple Federal agencies, have reached a tentative $13 billion settlement on the bank’s mortgage-related conduct in the run-up to the crisis. But the size is not necessarily a metric of accomplishment.
Read more...Bill Black: Arnold Kling’s Cunning Hairdresser Theory of the Financial Crisis
Yves here. I have to confess that I love this title. It serves as a reminder that the meme that lenders in the crisis were somehow victimized by borrowers is a lame defense of rank incompetence or worse. The basic rule of lending is that all you have is downside from a credit perspective. The borrower is never going to perform better than the terms of the agreement, and he may well do worse. Any competent lender knows that borrowers can be overly optimistic, naive, unlucky, or downright crooked. Lenders therefore need to take prudent measures to protect themselves from these well-known borrower foibles, the most important being not lending to obvious bad risks, and adding enough margin to your cost of borrowing to cover debtor bad luck and your own miscalculation. So to have a huge explosion of borrower defaults, including a meaningful swathe of subprime borrowers defaulting in the first 90 days, is proof not of massive borrower chicanery, but massive lender incompetence or corruption (as in presuming they could dump the dodgy loan on the next fool in the securitization pipeline).
Read more...Easy Access to Cannabis is Tempting
The decriminalisation of cannabis is a policy that divides policymakers sharply. This column uses evidence from the Netherlands to show a positive connection between early cannabis use and easy access to cannabis through coffeeshops. The policy implications, however, require further research. Closing coffeeshops could result in some potential users searching in the black market where hard drugs are available as well.
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