Category Archives: Regulations and regulators

Mirabile Dictu! Bank of America Found Guilty of Fraud for “Hustle” Mortgage Lending Program

Don’t get too excited.

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.

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.

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.

Whistleblower Suit Confirms that the New York Fed is in the Goldman Protection Racket

On Thursday, a former bank examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Carmen Segarra, filed a suit (embedded at the end of this post) against the New York Fed and several of its employees alleging, among other things, improper termination. The complaint is a doozy and some of the additional details supplied by Segarra to ProPublica make an already ugly picture look even worse.

Will China’s Gambit to Undermine the Trans-Pacific Partnership Succeed?

While eyes in the US have remained focused on the budget cliffhanger in Washington, in Bali, two sets of meetings were taking place. The first was the latest set of Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations. The US, led by John Kerry (Obama was supposed to make an appearance but the budget drama kept him away) met with representatives of the 12 nations it is pressing to agree to this deliberately mis-branded “trade deal”. The reason the label is misleading is that trade is already substantially liberalized; the real point of the TPP and its cousin, the pending EU-US trade agreement, is to weaken the power of nations to regulate, which will allow multinationals to lead a race to the bottom on product and environmental safety.

Calling on Yellen: Time for a Modest, Dull Fed

Most of the news accounts of Obama’s nomination of Janet Yellen as the next Federal Reserve Chairman focused either on what type of monetary stance she was likely to take or on biographical details.

But some writers have used the upcoming changing of the guard at the Fed to look at the bigger question of the Fed’s role, particularly now that it has continues to intervene in financial markets to an unprecedented degree, a full four years after the worst of the financial crisis had passed.

Trade Deals Must Allow for Regulating Finance

Yves here. In serious policy discussions, the rules of engagement are to to take rationales offered by each side at face value. So as useful as this article is in setting forth some high level but well supported reasons why the provisions of the Trans Pacific Partnership that would weaken financial regulations are a bad idea, it also has the unfortunate side effective of reinforcing a false narrative about the TPP and its European cousin. These pacts are not about trade. Trade is already substantially liberalized. Weakening national regulation is their main objective.

David Dayen: Mortgage Settlement Monitor Lets Servicers Steal From Customers for Two Years Before Stepping In With Toothless Metrics

By David Dayen, a lapsed blogger, now a freelance writer based in Los Angeles, CA. Follow him on Twitter @ddayen Joseph Smith, the National Mortgage Settlement Oversight Monitor, created four additional servicing metrics on Wednesday, in what has to be seen as an admission of what we’ve known for a good while – that the […]

Bill Black: Why do Conservatives Oppose Prosecuting Elite Corporate Frauds?

There are at least four principles that virtually all conservatives purport to support – except when the potential defendant is socially elite. I have written previously about two of these principles on several occasions – the need for accountability and “broken windows” theory that calls for the prosecutors to make the prosecution of even minor street crimes a high priority if they have, even indirectly, a material effect on the community.

The third principle is that it is vital to punish in order to deter crime. Gary Becker, the very conservative Nobel laureate in economics, emphasized this point (again, in the context of street crime). Under Becker’s theory of crime our current practices of allowing elite banksters to become wealthy through leading the “sure thing” of accounting control fraud with immunity from the criminal laws will predictably lead to new, larger epidemics of fraud that will continue to cause our recurrent, intensifying financial crises. It is rare, however, to find a prominent conservative who is demanding a priority effort to prosecute the elite bank officers who ran those frauds. I know of no conservative member of Congress publicly making that demand today. Senator Chuck Grassley has previously criticized the Obama administration’s failure to prosecute elite bankers.

So Why is Dimon Getting to Plead His Case for JP Morgan (and Maybe Himself) Directly with Holder?

I got this e-mail from a law school professor this evening:

wtf is with Eric Holder personally meeting with Jaimie Dimon? Since when do other targets of investigations get such access and solicitude?

Taibbi on How Wall Street is Looting Public Pension Funds

You must go, pronto, and read Matt Taibbi’s latest expose, on how hedge funds are plundering public pension funds, meaning pension funds managed on behalf of government employees like policemen, sanitation workers, and teachers. Taibbi describes how a concerted PR campaign has made workers the scapegoats for large pension shortfalls when in fact public officials and unscrupulous financiers (both through their machinations with these funds and via damage done by the global financial crisis) are the real perps.

The Fat Lady Has Yet to Sing for Dimon and JP Morgan

I thought I was late to write about JP Morgan’s $920 million multi-regulator settlement last week on the London Whale, but breathless news of a possible $11 billion settlement of mortgage-related liabilities has pushed the bank and its chief back under the hot lights.

Robert Reich, Inequality’s Intellectual Fraudster

Now it may seem churlish to take on a prominent former government official making a star turn to publicize one of the most pressing social and political problems in America, namely, our ever widening levels of inequality. But in fact, Reich is not only selling the equivalent of patent medicine as the remedy but he’s even getting commissions from some of the snake-oil manufacturers.