By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns Two weeks ago as the Financial Reform Bill was wending its way through Congress, Paul Kanjorski emerged as the champion of breaking up too-big-to-fail financial institutions. After seeing trillions of dollars in taxpayer money go to backstopping, propping up and guaranteeing the liabilities of weak financial institutions, It looked […]
Read more...The New York Times discusses a study (supposedly released, but the paper has yet to be posted) by corporate governance expert and Harvard Law School professor Lucien Bebchuk (along with Alma Cohen and Holger Spamann) on how much the top echelon at failed firms Bear Stearns and Lehman really suffered when their firms imploded. The […]
Read more...Many readers have complained of credit card issuers raising interest rates on their cards, even if the customer has pristine credit and never or rarely carries a balance. Now we are finally seeing some efforts to see how significant this is across all card users. A Rasmussen survey puts the total at 50% of all […]
Read more...The knives are starting to come out. DeFazio claims the discontent among the progressive wing has become acute. The Democratic Congressmen who have a operating brain cell know the considerable failings of Obama’s economic policies will be visited on them unless serious corrective action is taken in pretty short order. And that won’t happen with […]
Read more...Dear sports fans, your humble blogger, along with a ton of others, got the not-very-embargoed copy of the SIGTARP report on the New York Fed’s conduct with respect to its full payout on AIG’s credit default swaps to its counterparties. The press is treating the report as if it was tough. I was sputtering with […]
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. On Friday, William Dudley, President of FRBNY, gave an excellent presentation on the financial crisis. The speech was a […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0. Another Presidential junket to Asia and another one of the usual lectures from China, decrying our “profligate ways”. Today’s Wall Street Journal reports:, “China’s top banking regulator issued a sharp critique of U.S. financial management only hours before President Barack […]
Read more...When has a bureaucrat every wanted to give up on a big slush fund? Particularly one with no strings attached? What is heinous about the discussion of Treasury’s plan to argue that it should have its authority under the TARP extended is the failure to include some of the most basic and troubling issues. First, […]
Read more...The theater is starting to get interesting. Here in the US we have banker pay theater masquerading as the real thing. Kenneth Feinberg, the so-called pay-czar, struggles to collect a few scalps at the handful of TARP institutions under his domain, with the ever-intransigent AIG making headlines. This of course is meant to distract attention […]
Read more...A new bit of chicanery illustrates why it’s a lousy idea for the government to allow wards of the state like the GSEs and AIG to operate like kinda-sort private enterprises. When banks were nationalized in Sweden and Norway, the top brass and the boards were fired, and they were given strict goals and operating […]
Read more...Dear God, if you read the media, you’d really think the Congressional huffing and puffing at the banking industry was going to solve the “too big to fail” problem, or even make much of a difference. Folks, I hate to tell you, these remedies fall so far short of what it would take as to […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0. It seems odd that days after we were told by Goldman Sachs’s CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, that bankers are doing “God’s work”, we are still having active debates about how to regulate these selfless apostles of capitalism. The latest foray into […]
Read more...AIG’s CEO Robert Benmosche has displayed extraordinarily arrogance even before he took the job, so his latest stunt, a threat to leave AIG high and dry by quitting a mere three months in, should come as no surprise. Frankly, from the get-go, Benmosche fit the stereotype of a narcissistic top executive, with the extra seasoning […]
Read more...By George Washington of Washington’s Blog. A source on the Hill sent me the following summary of Senator Dodd’s proposed financial reform bill. My source notes: The summary leaves out Sections 1201-1204, which contain serious changes to the Federal Reserve bank structures, transparency elements, and restrictions on 13(3). Comments and observations are always welcome. Dodd […]
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 G-20 statement contained seven principles to guide policy during the balance of the crisis period. However, the agreed […]
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