By Nanea, a private equity insider
I’ll be having much more to say later about the Bain documents posted on Gawker.
In the meantime, I would like to point out the utterly misleading nature of the statement issued by Bain Capital in response to the documents’ release.
Read more...Ordinarily, it might not seem worth the bother to debunk yet another piece of bank propaganda. However Thursday’s op ed by former JP Morgan Chase chairman William Harrison, “Don’t Break Up the Big Banks,” recites a classic set of time-worn canards. As regulatory compliance expert Michael Crimmins said via e-mail, “It’s sounding desperate that they’re dragging Harrison out of retirement to spout this drivel.”Thus shredding this piece makes for one-stop shopping on this topic.
Read more...RT interviews University of Athens economics professor Yanis Varoufakis on the latest round of Greek bailout negotiations.
Read more...Ezra Klein demonstrated how far he’s has to descend into the Humpty Dumpty world of words meaning just what he chooses them to mean in order to defend failed Administration policies.
Read more...On the one hand, the dismal failure of the Administration’s cosmetic responses to the foreclosure mess is so evident that the New York Times is willing to acknowledge it, via a first page article titled, “Cautious Moves on Foreclosures Haunting Obama.” On the other, what the story offers is a whitewash, not an analysis.
Read more...If you merely looked at the SEC’s record on enforcement, you’d conclude that it suffered from a Keystone Kops-like inability to get out of its own way. The question remains whether that outcome is the result of unmotivated leadership (ex in the safe realm of insider trading cases) and long-term budget starvation leading to serious skills atrophy, or whether the SEC really, truly, is so deeply intellectually captured by the financial services industry that it thinks industry members don’t engage in fraud, they only make “mistakes”?
It’s sure looking like the latter.
Read more...Yves here. We’ve flagged in earlier posts how the Spanish banking crisis has the potential to become destabilizing politically, as if Spain wasn’t already at considerable risk of upheaval. Spanish depositors were pushed to convert their deposits into preference shares, which they were told were just as safe. This was a simple desperation move by the banks to save their own skins, customers be damned, by raising equity from the most unsophisticated source to which they had access. And now that that gambit failed, these shareholders are due to have those investments wiped out unless the Spanish authorities can cut a deal to spare them. Don’t hold your breath.
Read more...Yves here. A few quick comments on the New York state settlement.
Read more...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. Jointly posted with New Economic Perspectives
One of Governor Romney’s criticisms of President Obama is that he “takes his political inspiration from Europe….”
Read more...Reader Michael C. sent me a link to a story in the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog which bugged him, and I can see why.
Read more...I just got a press release from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency that its general counsel Julie Williams, an institution at the regulator for 19 years, is retiring. This is potentially a very big deal, because the OCC just underwent a leadership change from bank friendly John Walsh to a more measured Tom Curry, and the question was whether Curry would consolidate his leadership and move the regulator in a different direction. It looks like that’s what could be happening.
Read more...Yves here. This article falls in the “mirabile dictu” category: an economist arguing that putting bankers in jail is necessary to combat the deterioration in behavior.
By Giancarlo Spagnolo, Professor of Economics at University of Rome “Tor Vergata” and CEPR Research Affiliate. Cross posted from VoxEU
How to save the banks but not the bankers? This column argues that fines for criminal behaviour in banks are not enough – it may be time to start locking people up.
Read more...This Real News Network video provides an update on the Libor scandal. Tom Ferguson flags an issue that may come as a surprise to some readers.
Read more...The plot thickens! Today, the Wall Street Journal reported that, “Regulators Seek Unity in U.K. Bank Talks.”
If you read the article, a more accurate headline would be “Federal regulators desperate to get in front of Lawsky mob and call it a parade.” All the article says is the mucho unhappy and very much outflanked Federal regulators have gotten a meeting with Lawsky. Just look at the disconnect between the PR in the first paragraph and the actual state of play in the second:
Read more...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. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives.
Eduardo Porter began by studying physics but decided not to complete his studies and pursue a career in that field in favor of becoming a journalist. He worked for the Wall Street Journal before joining the New York Times, where he writes a periodic column. His primary interest is now economics. I was intrigued by a recent column he did entitled “The Folly of Attacking Outsourcing.”
I reviewed a number of Porter’s NYT columns to get a feel for his views. Defending outsourcing and minimizing the criticisms of undocumented immigrants are his twin passions. He has written roughly a dozen columns on each of these topics. Porter’s starting point is neo-liberal economics. As I will show, he does so despite knowing that neo-liberal economics dogma has proven disastrously wrong.
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