Category Archives: Regulations and regulators

Patrick Durusau: Social Security Numbers – Close Enough for a Drone Strike?

Yves here. It’s important to understand the scope and caliber of the police state apparatus that’s in place. The fact that it’s “dirty” meaning error-ridden and incomplete, is likely the big reason you have analysts like Edward Snowden with wide-ranging access. You still need humans to make connections and interpretations (and that introduces another layer for errors and plants to occur). And that also no doubt is used to justify even wider-ranging and more intrusive searches, such as NSA analysts listening to personal phone conversations of soldiers stationed in Iraq. That sort of casualness leads to abuses like NSA snoops inviting their colleagues to listen in on phone sex.

Mary Jo White Institutionalizes Deutsche Bank Protection Racket at the SEC

The Financial Times has caught a significant revolving door that its business press peers have largely overlooked.

Sheila Bair: Everything the IMF Wanted to Know About Financial Regulation and Wasn’t Afraid to Ask

Does anybody have a clear vision of the desirable financial system of the future?

Bill Black: How Elite Economic Hucksters Drive America’s Biggest Fraud Epidemics

Bill Black describes the spurious efforts to justify America’s recent fraudfests.

Bill Black: Great Moments in Nobel Prize History – 2007 Winner Pumps for Plutocracy, Billionaire CEOs

The first article in a series by Black on the remarkable, in the bad sense of the work, work by Nobel prize winners on regulation.

The Stealth Problem of Predatory Mortgage Modifications

Warning: mortgage modifications can be yet another exercise in bank predation.

Yanis Varoufakis: Mixed Messages from the IMF

Yves here. Note how the need to pretend Deutsche Bank is not undercapitalized, mentioned in passing in this post, is playing into policy.

An interview by Yanis Varoufakis, Professor of Economics at the University of Athens, with Tomas Hirst of Pieria. Cross posted from Yanis Varoufakis’ blog.

Wolf Richter: Lobbying And GMO Giant Monsanto Buckles In Europe

The “March Against Monsanto” in 52 countries, an unapproved strain of its genetically modified wheat growing profusely in Oregon, cancelled wheat export orders…. A rough week for Monsanto. Now it threw in the towel in Europe where its deep pockets and mastery of lobbying had failed: “It’s counterproductive to fight against windmills,” it explained.

Bill Black: How Dare DOJ Insult HSBC’s Crooks as Less “Professional” than Liberty Reserve’s Crooks?

By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Standard Chartered and HSBC’s leaders must be doubly humiliated by the description by Mythili Raman, the acting head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Criminal Division, of Liberty Reserve’s money laundering operation. UK laws are, of course, very congenial to those suing for libel and I am sure that these banking titans are meeting with their solicitors to demand a retraction and apology from Raman.

OCC Probe of JP Morgan Debt Collection Abuses Will Show if Agency Can Be Reformed

As readers probably know all too well, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has long been the most cronyistic of all bank regulators. So the default assumption when it cranks up an investigation is to assume that it’s just a window-dressing exercise or worse, a stealth bailout of some sort.

Yet the Washington Post tells us that the OCC is widening an investigation into debt collection, where alleged robosigner JP Morgan is the sinner-in-chief. What gives?

Time to Put the Heat on the Fed and FDIC to Fix Lousy Governance at TBTF Banks

Adam Levitin makes a sensible recommendation in a new post:

…what’s at stake in the corporate governance of a too-big-to-fail bank like JPMorgan Chase is not just the share price, but also the public fisc. There is a strong federal regulatory interest in having good governance at too-big-to-fail banks because of our explicit (FDIC) and implicit (bailout) insurance of too-big-to-fail banks.

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More on the Trumped-Up Charges Against Cyprus

As readers may recall, the Eurozone decided to make an example of Cyprus by using it to set the precedent of raiding deposits to fund a bailout (query: is a self-bailout even properly called a bailout?). But the moralists said Cyprus had it coming, since it was a seedy tax haven. A recently released official report summary supports those charges. Or did it?

IMF Rethinks Sovereign Defaults, Again

By Delusional Economics, who is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness

Dan Kervick: Reserve Balance Misconceptions

Yves here. While it may seem a bit unfair to make an example of Mark Thoma, since the statement he makes about bank reserves is conventional, Kervick’s post is a useful reminder of why this sort of thinking is misleading.

Gretchen Morgenson on Bill Moyers: Why Too Big to Fail Still Lives

This Bill Moyers segment gives a welcome view of Gretchen Morgenson recapping the sorry state of the “too big to fail” problem.