Paul Ryan has become a lightening rod for controversy, both for his aggressive plans to cut Medicare and Social Security and for questions surrounding suspicious-looking trades in financial stocks that were September 18, 2008, the same day Congressional leadership was briefed about the crisis by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.
The Real News Network interviewed Tom Ferguson to parse out history from hype on both issues.
Read more...No, He DIDN’T Say That!
Read more...In the coming weeks, Naked Capitalism will publish an investigative series on the private equity industry that will include articles written by current industry participants with considerable experience.
Read more...If you merely looked at the SEC’s record on enforcement, you’d conclude that it suffered from a Keystone Kops-like inability to get out of its own way. The question remains whether that outcome is the result of unmotivated leadership (ex in the safe realm of insider trading cases) and long-term budget starvation leading to serious skills atrophy, or whether the SEC really, truly, is so deeply intellectually captured by the financial services industry that it thinks industry members don’t engage in fraud, they only make “mistakes”?
It’s sure looking like the latter.
Read more...While MERS has served to illustrate the utter recklessness of the securitization industry, in that its promoters apparently believed that they could implement it nationwide and simply force state law to comply. But as the banks have found out, the law is not always so obliging.
Read more...In a bit of synchronicity, last weekend I had dinner with a buddy whose sibling recently was dunned by a buyer of junk debt. For those not familiar with this dark underbelly of the credit markets, these vultures buy consumer debt from banks (mainly credit card receivables) that the bank has written off. That means they don’t think it’s worth pursuing. At best it’s too close to the statute of limitations expiring or the documentation is questionable or the amounts are all wrong. Most of the time. it’s worse than that: the debt was never owed (they are going after the wrong person), the debt was paid off or discharged in bankruptcy, the statute of limitations has long passed.
Read more...Yves here. We’ve flagged in earlier posts how the Spanish banking crisis has the potential to become destabilizing politically, as if Spain wasn’t already at considerable risk of upheaval. Spanish depositors were pushed to convert their deposits into preference shares, which they were told were just as safe. This was a simple desperation move by the banks to save their own skins, customers be damned, by raising equity from the most unsophisticated source to which they had access. And now that that gambit failed, these shareholders are due to have those investments wiped out unless the Spanish authorities can cut a deal to spare them. Don’t hold your breath.
Read more...By Lynn Parramore, a contributing editor at Alternet. Cross posted from Alternet.
Team Romney wants you to believe Ryan didn’t really profit from privileged information. Don’t buy it.
Read more...By Moe Tkacik, a Brooklyn-based journalist who writes at Das Krapital. First published at Reuters.
You have probably mentally catalogued the student loan crisis alongside all the other looming trillion dollar crises busy imperiling civilization for the purpose of enriching the already rich. But it is different from those crises in a few significant ways, starting with the fact that the entire student loan business is arguably unconstitutional.
Read more...Yves here. A few quick comments on the New York state settlement.
Read more...By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Jointly posted with New Economic Perspectives
One of Governor Romney’s criticisms of President Obama is that he “takes his political inspiration from Europe….”
Read more...Reader Michael C. sent me a link to a story in the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog which bugged him, and I can see why.
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