Newsweek’s “Why is Barney Frank So Effing Mad?” is supposedly about the Congressman from Fidelity but is really about how the banksters are succeeding in neutering financial reform. One Congressional staffer has told me that everyone involved recognizes the measures don’t go far enough, but feel they can’t do much more (Congress can step out […]
Read more...By Satyajit Das, a risk consultant and author of Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives Wall Street Revalued: Imperfect Markets and Inept Central Bankers by Andrew Smithers (2009) The Road to Financial Reformation: Warnings, Consequences, Reforms by Henry Kaufman (2009) In a sense, this crisis is about values […]
Read more...The Bank of America stock offering, which will be used to repay the TARP, went off well, so surely this means the Charlotte bank is on the mend and its finances are sound, right? Chris Whalen, who is an expert on the banking industry and has a proprietary database that measures the risk of individual […]
Read more...There is a great and troubling little post up at Annaly (hat tip reader Scott) which confirms that all is far from well in bank-land. This story is consistent with the negative readings coming from bank maven Chris Whalen, whose latest proprietary stress ratings based on FDIC call reports found that : the far worse […]
Read more...The Senate Banking Committee will be chatting with Ben Bernanke this Thursday to vote on his reappointment. Demand that the Committee ask the following questions for our esteemed Esteemed Chairman (and contact your own Senators also and demand that they find out the answers to the following questions). If you are a Senate aide, please […]
Read more...By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. The Fed has recently come under heavy criticism, largely for its role in the AIG bailout. The Fed deserves […]
Read more...Among the most prophetic voices prior to the economic crash was UCLA economics professor Harold H. Somers, who warned in 1991 that revisions to the tax code would increase leverage, which could lead to economic disaster: The result is to tilt the well-worn playing field even more in favor of leveraging, leading to the possibility […]
Read more...Of late, the Treasury, House, and Senate have put forward proposals for how to resolve large financial institutions. The problem is that none of them seem to deal with the elephant in the room, namely, how the responsible grownups are going to deal with particular creditors and counterparties. For better or worse, bankruptcy procedures are […]
Read more...The United Arab Emirates offered a reassuring statement today after sending a bit more tough-minded message yesterday. The markets will not doubt take heart from the cheery word today, but we need to remind ourselves that the fat lady hasn’t sung yet. Unlike the conduct of banking authorities in the US towards their wayward charges, […]
Read more...By Thomas Adams, at Paykin Krieg and Adams, LLP, and a former managing director at Ambac and FGIC. Many thanks for the thoughtful comments on my earlier post. If you can take a little more on the subject, I thought I would add some clarification to some of the issues raised. First, on the merits […]
Read more...In a sign that the Federal Reserve is circling the wagons, chairman Ben Bernanke has an op-ed in the Washington Post that attempts to defend the central bank’s role. What is interesting is how much the tables have turned. The Obama effort to make the Fed into the uber bank regulator has become a rout, […]
Read more...For the record, zero is a very impressive achievement, so we have to give the Treasury department credit where credit is due. From Bloomberg: More than 650,994 loan revisions had been started through the Obama administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program as of last month, from about 487,081 as of September, according to the Treasury. None […]
Read more...Yesterday, I went after two targets in one post. The primary one was Andrew Ross Sorkin, who despite the considerable reporting and storytelling skills he demonstrated in Too Big Too Fail, seemed unable to keep a heavy-handed pro-Fed posture out of an article yesterday on the Paul-Grayson-DeMint bill, which more popularly goes by monickers like […]
Read more...By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns The Financial Times reports that British regulators have now opened up to reveal more of the details surrounding the emergency aid banks received during the most acute periods of stress to date in the financial crisis. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Federal Reserve continues to resist providing greater details. […]
Read more...Note: this post is by Thomas Adams, at Paykin Krieg and Adams, LLP, and a former managing director at Ambac and FGIC, with some minor additions by yours truly. This is a significant piece of some puzzles he, some other experts who prefer to remain anonymous, and I have been pushing on for several months. […]
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