A lot of investors I know lamented the loss of Gillian Tett. As the Financial Times’ capital markets editor in the runup to the crisis, she had provided very insightful commentary on some of the more arcane goings-on in the financial markets. I’ve had reason to look at her older commentary (circa 2004-2005) and some […]
Read more...Robert Johnson, former chief economist to the Senate Banking Committee, submitted testimony to a House Financial Services Committee hearing on OTC derivatives. His written testimony is to be posted today. While his remarks are worth reading in their entirety, one bit that caught my attention was his discussion of TDTR, or “Too Difficult to Resolve.” […]
Read more...By Jonathan Mintz, the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, and Richard H. Neiman, the Superintendent of Banks for the State of New York: For over a year, most of us have agreed that reform of our financial regulatory system is essential to our future financial stability and economic growth. Yet […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal reports that the pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg, is going to cut executive comp at 7 TARP recipients for the 25 most highly paid employees. Does this really mean anything? The press will noise it up as significant (and some outlets will no doubt finger wag at this “interference”) but the short […]
Read more...By George Washington of Washington’s Blog. Congressmen Grayson, Clay and Miller are introducing an amendment to the Consumer Financial Protection Agency bill: Today we will offer the “Financial Autopsy” amendment. The Grayson/Clay/Miller amendment is essential to attacking the root problem of consumer bankruptcy and foreclosure because it requires the CFPA to do a financial audit […]
Read more...You are a teacher at a local primary school. Each school day you and some of your colleagues watch over the children at the school playground to make sure all of the children follow the rules and keep their hands to themselves. Your role is to keep the children safe. Mind you, this is a […]
Read more...Watch the hour-long retrospective which aired last night on PBS’s Frontline. It should be very enlightening in regards to the seeds of the bubble and meltdown. It examines who the players in the 1990s and 2000s were, what their attitude to regulation was, and how lax regulation created a bubble and a bust. Also see […]
Read more...Paul Volcker wants to roll the clock back and restore Glass Steagall, the 1933 rule that separated commercial banking from investment banking, but Team Obama is politely ignoring him. Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, is giving a more strident version of the same message, calling on the biggest financial firms to […]
Read more...The New York Times published an edited extract from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big Too Fail (man, that book is so large, they can release a ton in advance and still have a book and a half of reading left over). This section is on some of Dick Fuld’s efforts to save Lehman. The Japanese […]
Read more...Paul Krugman is back to his old form on the financial services beat, now that the cracks in the Paulson/Geithner/Bernanke “give the banks what they want now, in size, worry about cleanup later” strategy is proving to have been the wrong way to go. My big beef is that he didn’t go far enough and […]
Read more...Wolfgang Munchau has a solid, thoughtful piece at the Financial Times which argues that the widely applauded rallies in stock and commodity markets are already looking very much like bubbles, and the efforts to contend with them (either directly, or as a result of the need to start reining in liquidity) is likely to kick […]
Read more...Actually, despite the somewhat churlish headline, the story “Bailout Helps Fuel a New Era of Wall Street Wealth,” by Graham Bowley at the New York Times, is a solid job of reporting and does not tiptoe around the issue of the big bennies that the financial services industry is enjoying and their role in creating outsized […]
Read more...Two good segments from an interview with Elizabeth Warren of the Congressional Oversight Panel (hat tip reader Scott) at Tech Ticker: Warren discusses how banks are winning, hands down, in getting the rules they want: Watch the video here. Key quote from her discussion of bonuses: “I do not understand how financial institutions could think […]
Read more...By George Washington of Washington’s Blog. William K. Black – professor of economics and law, and the senior regulator during the S & L crisis – says that that the government’s entire strategy now – as during the S&L crisis – is to cover up how bad things are (“the entire strategy is to keep […]
Read more...Submitted by Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns. In the 1987 movie classic Wall Street, the sinister protagonist Gordon Gekko played by Michael Douglas gives this famous quote: In the last seven deals that I’ve been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pretax profit of 12 billion dollars. Thank you. I […]
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