A new paper by Mark Weisbrot and Helene Jorgensen of CEPR have managed to unearth a dirty little secret: the IMF doesn’t just prescribe broadly similar policies in its Article IV consultations, it looks like its hands out the same medicine. We’ve used the metaphor of breaking countries on the rack, but cutting them to fit a Procrustean bed might be more apt.
Read more...A major intellectual blind spot in academia and among policy makers is the belief that making markets more liquid is always and ever a good thing.
Read more...By Marcy Wheeler. Cross posted from emptywheel
Remarkably, on the same day two Senators (one of them named in the article) reminded Eric Holder that Lanny Breuer said this….
Read more...I think I and prosecutors around the country, being responsible, should speak to regulators, should speak to experts, because if I bring a case against institution, and as a result of bringing that case, there’s some huge economic effect — if it creates a ripple effect so that suddenly, counterparties and other financial institutions or other companies that had nothing to do with this are affected badly — it’s a factor we need to know and understand.
In this post in our Bank of America foreclosure review series, whistleblowers describe how the bank and its independent consultant Promontory Financial Group designed and managed the tests so as to minimize findings of harm to borrowers.
Read more...This post is the second half of Part III in our Bank of America foreclosure review whistleblower series. Part III focuses on how the confusion and high cost of the foreclosure reviews weren’t simply the result of overly ambitious targets and poor design, oversight, and implementation of the reviews. These reviews never could have been done properly due to significant gaps and inaccuracies in the borrower records at Bank of America. That meant the only possible course of action was a cover-up.
Read more...Past whistleblower leaks from Bank of America and other reviews have pointed out how frequent changes to the review process, both from the OCC and from the independent reviewers, made the process disorderly. This confusion is likely to serve as a convenient excuse for why the costs of the reviews exploded, which was one of the two major rationales offered for shutting them down.
At Bank of America, the disorderliness of the project is only part of the story. Focusing on that aspect serves to exculpate OCC, the bank and Promontory. The dirty secret of these reviews is they could never have been done properly.
Read more...By Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus
I can’t emphasize enough how satisfying it is to see Timothy Geithner finally leave government. True, it would have been more enjoyable to see him leave in handcuffs, but I take my satisfaction where I can get it.
Read more...By Delusional Economics, who is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.
I’m slowly working my way through the material that’s coming out of World Economic Forum in Davos. I tend not to take too much attention of what is said at this particular conference as, in my opinion, it tends to be full of self-serving tripe in the most part.
I did, however, notice a small interview with Icelandic President, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, which was quite interesting.
Read more...A ruling by the Washington, DC federal appeals court in Noel Canning v. NLRB pretty much ends the ability of presidents to make recess appointments, a measure that has been used since 1867. The suit successfully challenged a NLRB rulemaking on the grounds that three of the five directors were recess appointments which meant the NLRB lacked a quorum to give it authority to act.
Read more...By Ian Fraser, a financial journalist who blogs at his web site and at qfinance. .
This is the first interview that Chicago lawyer Anton Valukas has given since the publication of his 2,292 page report into the bankrutpcy of Lehman Brothers on March 11th, 2010. At that time, Valukas found strong evidence of financial and accounting fraud designed to deceive investors at the defunct New York-based investment bank. Valukas is surprised, especially given Lehman Brothers’ rampant abuse of Repo 105 to disguise its precarious financial position in the quarters ahead of its September 2008 collapse, that the former Lehman Brothers’ chief executive Dick Fuld or any other Lehman Brothers’ director has been charged with fraud or related offences.
Read more...Econ4, a group of heterodox economists who “believe that the economy should serve the people, the planet, and the future,” has released its latest video, on regulation. Yours truly has a bit part.
Read more...By C.P. Chandrasekhar, Professor of Economics, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Cross posted from Triple Crisis
In a move that went contrary to what is expected of regulators, the Securities and Exchange Commission of the US approved in mid-December a controversial JP Morgan-created exchange-traded fund (ETF) backed by physical supplies of copper.
Read more...In the executive summary to this series, we provided an overview of OCC/Federal Reserve foreclosure reviews which were abruptly settled at the beginning of January. Critics anticipated that the flawed design, of having supposedly “independent” review firms hired by the banks themselves, meant the reviews were highly unlikely to find much if any damage to homeowners. Leaks during the course of the reviews confirmed these concerns, revealing that the review process at many of the major servicers was chaotic and the reviews were designed and scored so as to make a finding of harm virtually impossible.
As bad as that sounds, the reality is even worse.
Read more...After extensive debriefing of Bank of America whistleblowers, we found overwhelming evidence that the bank engaged in certain abuses frequently, in some cases pervasively, in its servicing of delinquent mortgages. This is the first in a series of posts discussing our findings and providing support for these charges.
Read more...Obama’s likely nomination of Mary Jo White to head the SEC is such a departure from his normal picks that it is enough to make me believe in the claims that he plays 11 dimensional chess. There must be more here than meets the eye.
Read more...