Elizabeth Warren Attacks Beltway Powerhouse Third Way as Fronting for Wall Street
Wow, the gloves are finally coming off.
Read more...Category Archives: Regulations and regulators
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
Read more...Bob Goodwin: Software Engineering in Crisis – Healthcare.gov is Just the Dead Canary
It has been a good generation to be involved with software. The scarcity of the skillset combined with the demand for the output have generated outsized incomes, while the work has been consistently rewarding. Our quirky group of builders has had an outsized influence on our industries, not to mention our culture and ideals. But that influence is looking less benign as the rigid procedures of computing are changing commercial relationships and the application of the law.
Read more...Wolf Richter: Use Bitcoin As A Currency, Get Wiped Out (The Government Likes It That Way)
Four years after its creation, folks are still arguing over what bitcoin is: “investment opportunity of the millennium,” “part of a societal revolution,” a security, a currency, a casino token? Whatever. But US regulators now have strategy of killing it as a currency
Read more...CNI (UK) and its Lawyers Complain to Blogs, But Appear to Shy Away From the Daily Mail
CNI (UK)’s confusing attitude to its connections with Carbon Neutral Investments, service provider to carbon scams
Read more...David Dayen: IRS Confirms that $12 Billion in “Mortgage Relief” in National Mortgage Settlement Completely Worthless
The IRS settles something I noticed a while ago and has now been finally confirmed. In short: big banks who robbed homes from Americans got a penalty that entailed, quite literally, giving homeowners worthless allowances.
The issue concerns the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act, which expires at the end of the year. After December 31, all mortgage relief that involves debt forgiveness of any kind will be taxable to the borrower. This affects principal reductions, of course, but also short sales, with the idea being that this involves the bank “forgiving” the difference between the total owed on the mortgage and the price of the short sale. There are hardships exemptions to this but they involve the functional equivalent of bankruptcy – you have to prove that your total liabilities exceed your total assets.
Read more...CFTC’s Bart Chilton Takes it to the (Position) Limits One More Time
Yves here. This post is important not simply because it describes where the fight over position limits stands and why it’s important, but it also gives some insight into regulator processes. It makes clear how even as few as two well placed officials, Bart Chilton and Gary Gensler, did a great deal to hold the line against predatory large financial firms. It also shows how hard regulators have to fight to do their job.
Read more...The Wall Street Code: HFT Whisteblower Haim Bodek on Algorithmic Trading
Haim Bodek is a former Goldman and UBS trader, more recently the founder of his own trading firm, who has come firmly out against how stock exchanges work with high frequency traders. Readers spoke approvingly of this recently-released short documentary about his efforts.
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