Category Archives: Regulations and regulators

Soliciting Nominations for the FEMA Awards for Exceptional Financial Crisis Management

We are in the process of seeking recommendations for our inaugural FEMA Awards for Exceptional Financial Crisis Management. We must thank our reader Swedish Lex for providing the inspiration for establishing these prizes.

We are looking for nominees in each category. We have provided some illustrative candidates for specific prizes. Readers are also encouraged to suggest additional categories if they feel we have overlooked noteworthy types of crisis behavior that are worthy of recognition.

Our initial categories:

Elizabeth Warren Out as Possible Head of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

We have said for some time Warren was not going to get head the new consumer financial protection agency. Obama was not willing to ruffle the banks, and Geithner, who is is most powerful Cabinet member, would not stand for it). Nevertheless, we are disappointed by this outcome. And it seems a bit churlish for this news to be leaked the day after she ran the gauntlet with the House Oversight Panel. From Bloomberg:

Mirabile Dictu! SEC Prods Banks Over Mortgage Litigation Reserves

When the SEC wakes up and starts acting like a regulator, you know something serious is afoot.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the securities agency, spooked by Bank of America setting aside over $20 billion for mortgage-related liability, has sent letters to “a number of banks” asking them to do a better job of disclosing what their legal liability is (the elephant in the room is of course the mortgage mess) and making adequate reserves. Per their story:

Satyajit Das: European Debt – Wrong Diagnosis, Wrong Treatment!

By Satyajit Das, the author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (forthcoming August 2011) and Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives – Revised Edition (2006 and 2010)

Executed with Northern European creativity, charm, flexibility and humility and Mediterranean organisation, leadership diligence and appetite for hard work, the European rescue plan – “the grand compact” – is failing.

Bank of America $8.5 Billion Mortgage “Settlement” Under Fire

We took an immediate dislike to the so called Bank of America mortgage settlement, in which the trustee for 530 mortgage trusts, Bank of New York, has entered into deal in which the bank will pay $8.5 billion to settle not only putback liability (having to compensate investors by buying back loans that never should have been put in the trusts in the first place) but also chain of title liability to investors (otherwise known as “my dog ate your mortgage”; note this would NOT impair the ability of homeowners to raise that issue in foreclosure).

We criticized the deal as being bad for homeowners (as in likely to accelerate foreclosures, rather than alleviate them, as claimed), bad for investors (due to the amount being too low for putbacks and an outrageous sellout based on the waiver for chain of title problems) and rife with conflicts of interest. Indeed, almost immediately after the settlement was announced, a group of investors who had been pursuing their own claims on three of the trusts in the settlement filed a petition as a means of objecting to the deal and its failure to provide a means for investors like them to opt out.

Two public officials, Eric Schneiderman, the New York attorney general, and Representative Brad MIller, who is a member of the House Financial Services Committee, apparently also suspect the pact does not pass the smell test and are asking some tough questions.

Satyajit Das: “Progress” of the European Debt Crisis

By Satyajit Das, the author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (forthcoming August 2011) and Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives – Revised Edition (2006 and 2010)

In Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Bracknell memorably remarks that: “To lose one parent… may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” The Euro-zone’s need to rescue three of its members (Greece, Ireland and Portugal) with three others increasingly eyed with varying degrees of concern (Spain, Belgium and Italy) smacks of institutionalised incompetence.

News Corp Targeted Former PM Gordon Brown: Hacked Police, Medical Records; Obtained Bank Information

The latest revelations in the widening News International scandal are simply stunning. “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown” is apparently as true now as it was in Shakespeare’s day. The idea that a news organization would have the audacity to target a head of state, as News International papers the Sun and the Sunday Times did with Gordon Brown, and not with the usual tools of invective and gossip, but via the theft of personal information, raises the scandal to a whole new level.

Did Sheila Bair Save the US From Complete Financial Meltdown?

When a moderate (meaning anachronistic) Republican proves to be a more tough minded regulator than Democrats, it serves as yet another proof of how far the county has moved to the right. Bair, in a long “exit interview” with Joe Nocera, says a number of things that would have been regarded as commonsensical and obvious in the 1980s, yet have a whiff of radicalism about them in our era of finance uber alles. For instance: Bear should have been allowed to fail, TBTF banks are a menace (well, she doesn’t say that, but makes it clear she regards them as repugnant), bank bondholders should take their lumps.

Bair was alert to the dangers of subprime, having recognized how dangerous it could be in the early 2000s (when a smaller version of the market blew up, taking homeowners along with it), and was not a believer of the Paulson/Bernanke party line that subprime would be “contained”. She long championed mortgage mods as better for lenders, borrowers, and the economy, and has fought an uphill battle with the Administration on that front. With the IndyMac failure, which put the subprime lender/servicer in the FDIC’s lap, she pushed hard to develop a template for how to do them, which then was ignored by the Administration (they did HAMP instead, an embarrassment which she refused from the outset to endorse).

The piece serves as an indictment of the banking industry toadies in the officialdom, namely the Treasury, Fed, and OCC. One priceless quote:

Summer Rerun: Geithner and Summers as Obama’s Cheney and Rumsfeld

Readers new to this site may be unfamiliar with Yves’ summer rerun series, in which she reprises vintage NC posts that have stood the test of time. I would like to add a post of mine from Credit Writedowns to the lot. The recent New York Times piece from Joe Nocera on Sheila Bair is […]

News of the World Scandal: “The Murdochs Have Lost Control of Events” (Updated)

For those of us on the wrong side of the pond, it’s hard to appreciate the significance of the News of the World scandal. A 2009 investigation of this News Corp tabloid for interceptions of messages to royal aides led to a private investigator and a News of the World employee being convicted and sentenced to prison. The current scandal centers on the paper hacking into the voice mailboxes of over 2000 individuals. Sources allege the victims include Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor of the Exchequer (Treasury secretary) George Osborne.

But the event that galvanized opinion, as most readers know now, was the hacking into the phone and deleting messages of a girl who was abducted and murdered in 2002, Milly Dowler. The removal of the messages allowed the voicemailbox, which had been full, to take more messages, all for the purpose of getting more juicy messages from her desperate friends and relatives, at the ghoulish cost of giving them the false hope that she had deleted them and was therefore still alive.

On Dangerous Disconnect Between Economics and Ecology

William Rees is one of the pioneers of ecological economics and is the originator and co-developer of ‘ecological footprint analysis’. This video contains some basic facts about current consumption levels in advanced economies that are attention-grabbing. I’d normally say “Enjoy” but this is not that sort of video.

Fed Releases More Details on Its Effort to Bail Out Lehman and Other Dealers

Bloomberg has a new story on its continuing efforts to pry more information out of the Fed on who borrowed what when in the runup to the financial crisis. The central bank had refused to provide details of what various needy financial firms had gotten under its single tranche open markets operations program, which was launched in March 2008. Lehman received a peak amount of $18 billion out of a total program size of $80 billion.

Now why does all this matter?

Summer Rerun – The Empire Continues to Strike Back: Team Obama Propaganda Campaign Reaches Fever Pitch

Readers new to this site may be unfamiliar with our summer reruns, in which we reprise vintage NC posts that we think have stood the test of time pretty well.

We’ve done these more or less in chronological order (our last one was our post on the unveiling of the TARP), but we decided to skip ahead to one in 2010 because it focuses on a crucial bit of history that is too often overlooked, and were were reminded of it by a very good Frank Rich piece in New York Magazine on Obama’s failure to bring bankers to account.

Even Rich’s solid piece treats Obama more kindly that he should be. He depicts the President as too easily won over by “the best and the brightest) in the guise of folks like Robert Rubin and his protege Timothy Geithner.

We think this characterization is far too charitable. Obama had a window in time in which he could have acted, decisively, to rein the financial services in, and he and his aides chose to let it pass and throw their lot in with the banksters. That fatal decision has severely constrained their freedom of action, as we explain below.

Government: The Dominant Player in US Credit Markets?

The latest column by Gillian Tett provides further support for our pet thesis: that the role of the state in banking is so great and the subsidies so wideranging that they cannot properly be considered private companies and should be regulated as utilities.

Key extracts: