Occupy the SEC to Jamie Dimon: We Told You So
By Occupy the SEC
Jamie Dimon’s plan to enfeeble the Dodd-Frank reforms, specifically the Volcker rule, has blown up spectacularly.
Read more...Category Archives: Regulations and regulators
Robert Shiller is Wrong
By David Llewellyn-Smith, the founding publisher and former editor-in-chief of The Diplomat magazine, now the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics website. He is also the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut. Cross posted from MacroBusiness
The American academic Robert Shiller has taken another contrarian tack with his latest book Finance and the Good Society. His claim is that Western finance has lost the sense of virtue that it once had.
Read more...JP Morgan Loss Bomb Confirms That It’s Time to Kill VaR
One of the amusing bits of the hastily arranged JP Morgan conference call on its $2 billion and growing “hedge” losses and related first quarter earning release was the way the heretofore loud and proud bank was revealed to have feet of clay on the risk management front.
Read more...Mirable Dictu! Moody’s to Adjust Bank Ratings Downward for Regulatory Arbitrage
It’s hard to imagine anyone will take tough-sounding stances by ratings agencies seriously, but Moody’s, in a chat with the Financial Times, says it has (finally) taken notice of how banks play games with regulatory capital requirements.
Read more...Jamie Dimon Misrepresented “London Whale” Risks, Admits to $2+ Billion Loss Plus Risk Management Black Eye
As readers likely know by now, Jamie Dimon hastily arranged an after hours conference call today, in which he admitted to $2 billion in losses in the last six weeks from a trade by the “London Whale”, Bruno Michel Iksil in the bank’s Chief Investment Office, with as much as another potential $1 billion in losses in the offing.
Read more...Quelle Surprise! Fed Defends Incompetent Bank Management Against Investors
Reader Hecht pointed out a new piece by Steven Davidoff at the New York Times’ Dealbook, illustrating the lengths to which the Fed will go to defend incumbent bank managements.
Read more...More on Frontline’s Astonishing Whitewash of the Crisis
As readers may know, a recent post, “Frontline’s Astonishing Whitewash of the Crisis,”discussed the first half of the Frontline series, “Money, Power & Wall Street.” Producers Mike Wiser and Martin Smith sent a letter taking issue with this review, and I made an exception to my usual practice and posted their missive.
The major dispute is over whether their series lets the financial services industry off too lightly.
Read more...Economists, Liquidity Mongers and the Banker Assault on Financial Reform
This has been a bad stretch for advocates of financial reform – and therefore for the economy as a whole. One after the other, new financial regulations contained in the Dodd-Frank law are being gutted or delayed by regulators and Congress, while the bankers – escorted by a phalanx of paid economists, lawyers and lobbyists – are squealing “wee, wee, wee” all the way home.
Read more...Les Leopold: How Wall Street Drives Up Gas Prices
By Les Leopold, the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It. Cross posted from Alternet
Gasoline prices have been falling in recent weeks, but they’re still close to their five-year high after climbing steeply for three years. For every penny increase at the pump, $1.4 billion per year leaves our collective pockets, creating a drag on the sluggish “recovery.” Where does it go and what caused the price explosion at the pump?
Read more...Mirabile Dictu! The SEC is Getting Disgusted With Lawyers Pulling the Same Tricks in SEC Investigations that They Pull in Foreclosure Land Every Day
The Wall Street Journal has an entertaining account, if your taste runs to black humor, of how legal chicanery has reached such high levels that the SEC is toying with the idea of going after it directly.
Read more...Satyajit Das: The European Debt Crisis Redux
By Satyajit Das, derivatives expert and the author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives – Revised Edition (2006 and 2010). Jointly posted with Roubini Global Economics
The half-life of solutions to Europe’s debt problem is getting ever shorter.
Recent hopes have relied on the ostensible success of the European Central Bank’s (“ECB”) LTRO – Long Term Refinancing Operation, more appropriately termed the Lourdes Treatment and Resuscitation Option.
Read more...Memo to Schneiderman Mortgage Task Force: When You are in a Hole, Quit Digging
The much ballyhooed mortgage task force seems to be hewing to the Obama play book of believing that any problem can be solved with better propaganda.
Read more...Morgan Sandquist: Finance in Denial – The Addiction
By Morgan Sandquist, a member of the Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking Group. Cross posted from mathbabe
Is it fair to say that because the quality of the denial surrounding the banking industry’s problems is so similar to that of the denial surrounding addiction, that addiction is therefore the root of those problems and our ongoing failure to adequately address them? Perhaps not, but others have come to describe money, debt, and banking as something very much like addiction for entirely different, and far better argued, reasons.
Read more...Frontline’s Astonishing Whitewash of the Crisis
Several of my savviest readers wrote expressing disappointment and consternation with the Frontline series on the crisis, “Money, Power, and Wall Street.” The first two parts of the four part series have been released, and it’s probably safe to say that this program is far enough along to be beyond redemption.
Read more...Morgan Sandquist: Finance in Denial
By Morgan Sandquist, a member of the Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking Group. Cross posted from mathbabe
The largest banks in America–Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and others–are probably insolvent.
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