Category Archives: Risk and risk management

Banks Desperate for Profits Seek Out Risky Credit Card Customers

anks, having trashed their once-sound model for the credit card business, are back trolling to find credit junkies, albeit of a somewhat safer type than the ones that blew up on them in the credit crisis.

Back in the 1980, the credit card industry, despite being more fragmented than now, had what looked a lot like oligopolistic pricing.

On MBIA’s Suit Against Morgan Stanley on a Second Lien Deal Gone Bad

n theory, I’m a wee bit late to the item at hand, a suit by failed mortgage bond insurer MBIA against Morgan Stanley on a second mortgage deal. But in practice, I’ve not seen any commentary on it and the suit has some interesting wrinkles.

Before we get to the details, however, a general issue: looking at this case is like deciding which of Cinderella’s bad sisters is less ugly. While mortgage bond originators and sponsors did not cover themselves in glory in the later years of the subprime business, MBIA is no prize. Of all the monolines, MBIA was the most dubious. In addition to the general, and now well known problem with the industry business model, that they were running at such high leverage levels that they could not take on any real risks, MBIA has its own special cause for concern, namely a less-than-arms-length reinsurance operation. And management has major ‘tude. I’ve never read investor reports that were as haughty and obviously truth-stretching as MBIA, and thus any claims it makes about the merits of pending litigation need to be taken with a fistful of salt.

Mirabile Dictu: The Treasury Flexes Some Muscle on the Volcker Rule?

As readers know, this blog has LOOONG been a critic of the Treasury Department’s stance towards big dealer banks, both in the Paulson era and from the very get-go of Geithner’s tenure. So on those all-too-rare occasions when Treasury seems willing to meddle in a real way with the “heads we win, tails you lose” arrangement the financial services industry has managed to devise with broader society, it’s important to applaud those efforts.

Admittedly, it is premature to declare victory, but the fact that Treasury is even taking a serious stance on the so-called Volcker rule is a surprise.

The plank in Schäuble’s eye

From the look of it, the Irish bailout is taking another chunk of another one of FT Alphaville stalwart Neil Hume’s weekends. From Peston European finance ministers are struggling to reach agreement on the interest rate to be paid by Ireland for the €85bn of rescue finance it is set to receive from the EU […]

Guest Post: Will the Irish Crisis Spread to Italy?

By Paolo Manasse, Professor of Macroeconomics and International Economic Policy at the University of Bologna and Giulio Trigilia, Master’s student at Collegio Carlo Alberto. Cross posted from VoxEU. Is Italy the next European country to go? This column argues that the jury is still out, although the grace period will not extend beyond three years. […]

G20 Proposes Fig Leaf Regulatory Regime for Biggest Banks

The latest idea out of the G20, that of creating an international regulatory structure for the biggest international banks, sounds like progress but I doubt it will prove to be. Some regulators took note of the dangers posed by globe-spanning financial behemoths prior to the crisis. The Bank of England, in its April 2007 Financial […]

Lobbying to Keep the Capital Markets a Casino

Keynes, himself a successful investor, was alert to the danger of a disproportionate level of speculative activity. His oft-repeated remark: Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country […]

The Irish Mess (IV)

The domestic politics of Ireland are still on a tightrope. Their coalition government, which had has been studiously ignoring three empty parliamentary seats, has now been told by the Supreme Court to get on with it and hold by-elections for one of them, which has been unoccupied for a scandalous 18 months. The by-election is […]

A critical assessment of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act

By Viral Acharya, Professor of Finance, Stern School of Business, New York University, Thomas F. Cooley Professor of Economics, Stern School of Business and Faculty of Arts and Science, New York University, Matthew Richardson, Professor of Applied Economics, Stern School of Business, New York University, Richard Sylla, Professor of Economics, Stern School of Business, New […]

Richard Alford: Fed Hasn’t Learned From the Crisis

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. Even prior to the financial crisis of 2007, economists and policymakers actively debated whether central banks should use interest […]

Guest Post: The Foreign Exchange Mystery

By Wallace C. Turbeville, former CEO of VMAC LLC and a former Vice President of Goldman, Sachs & Co, now Visiting Scholar at the Roosevelt Institute. Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0 Why would such a large swaps market be a possible exemption from FinReg? The traded foreign exchange market is the big enchilada. It is […]

Bank Disinformation III: Obama Throws Weight Behind Banks, Housing “Market” Over Borrowers

I should have expected this, Team Obama is so predictably bank friendly that it was inconceivable that the Administration would ever decide against them on anything other than the occasional sop to maintain plausible deniability. But this morning’s news stories reveal the officialdom isn’t even bothering to keep up appearances. First, from Politico writer Ben […]

Das on Eurozone Outlook

I’m running this clip of Satyajit Das for several reasons. First, it gives a very good big picture view of the problems with the Eurozone rescue fund, and is germane given that those concerns are coming to the fore (witness our post earlier today). Second, more generally, it gives readers a chance to see him […]

Wallace Turbeville: Report from the Frontlines – Mission Not Accomplished on Derivatives Reform

By Wallace Turbeville, the former CEO of VMAC LLC and a former Vice President of Goldman Sachs who writes for New Deal 2.0 It is now obvious that when President Bush made his victory speech on the aircraft carrier in front of the now-famous “Mission Accomplished” banner, he was a bit premature in his assessments. […]