This blog warned a few weeks ago of a coming campaign by the officialdom against so-called “strategic defaulters”. It has arrived even sooner than we expected. We warned that this development was the inevitable result of financial firms, taking an increasingly predatory posture toward their customers. Borrowers are responding in kind, by taking a cold-blooded […]
Read more...I want the word “reform” back. Between health care “reform” and financial services “reform,” Obama, his operatives, and media cheerleaders are trying to depict both initiatives as being far more salutary and far-reaching than they are. This abuse of language is yet another case of the Obama Adminsitration using branding to cover up substantive shortcomings. […]
Read more...Gulf resident and fisherman’s wife Kindra Arnesen took advantage of the offer extended to her to visit cleanup sites and staff meetings: At any rate, I was invited the following week to go behind “enemy lines.” They gave me, of all people, security clearance to go into the base of operations meetings in Venice, Louisiana […]
Read more...By Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive When the financial crisis hit, I was in the direct line of fire. My company blew up very early in the crisis, giving me the dubious opportunity to see how bad things were going to get long before most of the rest of the world, including […]
Read more...In a weak nod to “too big to fail” concerns, House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank announced that larger banks and hedge funds would pay a fee as a way of pre-funding resolution costs. From the Financial Times: The proposed levy emerged as an unwelcome surprise for the industry deep into a late-evening congressional […]
Read more...By Mike Konczal, a former financial engineer and fellow with the Roosevelt Institute who writes at New Deal 2.0 A year ago a week from today I discussed the financial innovation that wasn’t. It was a look at Lewis Ranieri, the creator of the mortgage backed security, as well as one of the minds behind […]
Read more...One of the dead bodies in plain sight that generally goes unremarked upon in polite company is the buyers’ strike in the securitization market. Issuance of private label (as in non-government guaranteed) residential mortgage backed securities has collapsed, with government entities insuring 96.5% of all home mortgages in the first quarter 2010. The commercial mortgage […]
Read more...The UK emergency budget, which will impose a £2billion tax on banks, both domestic and foreign bank operations domiciled there, along with the upcoming G20 meetings, is pushing a contentious issue to the fore: how and how much to tax banks. There are two motivations at work. First, with most advanced economies keen to narrow […]
Read more...The problem with propaganda is that it is generally effective. Utter the Big Lie often enough and most people will come to believe it. The Obama Administration has engaged in persistent misrepresentation of the outcome of the TARP equity injections, which is a manifestation of its early decision to reconstitute as much as possible, the […]
Read more...By Wallace C. Turbrville, the former CEO of VMAC LLC who writes at New Deal 2.0 In the 1930s, a great many Southerners had no access to electricity. The Roosevelt administration perceived an enormous opportunity to restructure the region’s economy. By building facilities to bring power to the rural South, jobs would be created from […]
Read more...George Magnus, senior economic advisor at UBS, provided a reading of the Chinese central bank’s announcement on its currency policy over the past weekend. He sees it as political, “symbolic rather than substantive.” He also contends that China needs to make significant policy changes. From the Financial Times: It would be churlish not to acknowledge […]
Read more...As we noted last week, Spain has forced the hand of other Eurozone bank regulators by declaring it will release the results of recent ECB stress tests, which earlier were to be published only on an aggregated basis, not bank by bank. There is still a good bit of confusion as to what happens next. […]
Read more...The New York Times yesterday featured an article by Yale economist Robert Shiller in which he discussed how financial reform had fallen short of addressing the conditions that caused the crisis. He focused on the failure to implement effective pay reform at the large financial firms that too big or otherwise too crucial to fail: […]
Read more...The Chinese central bank made a vague announcement about its currency policy on its website today, which the officialdom, on cue, treated as a major move (to wit: “China vows increased currency flexibility” at the Financial Times, “Chinese say they intend to free up their currency,” Washington Post).) As we describe below, this “announcement” is […]
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