Author Archives: Matt Stoller

Marcy Wheeler is a blogger and analyst who specializes in weedy document dumps.  This blog post is cross-posted from Emptywheel.

Two weeks ago, Treasury fired the guy in charge of FinCEN (the part of Treasury that enforces and tracks Suspicious Activities Reports), Jim Freis, reportedly (pay wall) because he wanted to focus on law enforcement and financial crimes, rather than a more focused counterterrorism focus.

The issue wasn’t Fincen’s speed or personality conflicts, but more about control. To put it simply, Treasury wants more oversight of Fincen’s activities, including additional focus on international areas such as terrorist financing. “Fincen ought to be better integrated and tethered to the policy issues that relate to money laundering, terrorist financing and economic sanctions on behalf of the U.S. government. It’s not as well integrated as it should be,” said a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

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Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.  You can follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller

The question of civil liberties versus privacy carries with it an entire set of tired arguments and predictable political posturing.  The debate, however, is changing radically, because the capabilities to invade and control privacy have become extremely granular, and the profit motive has now changed the traditional actor in surveillance from the state to the private corporation.

Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.  You can follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller

What happens with a society’s social contract collapses?  That question is being posed in Greece right now.  Often what happens is that so-called “swamp things”, like the Greek neo-Nazi group Golden Dawn, emerge.  Often, the left begins articulating a genuine alternative vision.  And the corrupt rotted center calls in every chip it can, hoping to preserve patronage and corruption.  Right now, much of the Euro-elite, when not panicking about Spanish borrowing costs, is watching the anti-bailout Greek left (Syriza) and the pro-bailout center right (New Democracy) running neck and neck in the polls.  If Greece goes anti-bailout, it’s going to create tremendous political uncertainty.  With much of the left in Europe looking to Greece, a win by Syriza in mid-June could spark similar anti-bailout left-wing alternatives, much as the Arab Spring ignited the Occupy movement.

By Delusional Economics, who is horrified at the state of economic commentary in Australia and is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.

European monetary aggregate data from the ECB came out this week and continues to follow the trends we have seen over the last year.

The annual growth rate of the broad monetary aggregate M3 decreased to 2.5% in April 2012, from 3.1% in March 2012.1 The three-month average of the annual growth rates of M3 in the period from February 2012 to April 2012 stood at 2.7%, unchanged from the previous period.

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By Michael Crimmins, who has worked on risk management and Sarbanes Oxley compliance for major banks

The bad news just keeps on coming in the JP Morgan CIO scandal. We’re getting a lot of salacious detail, but the media manages to continue to miss the bigger picture.  On Tuesday, David Henry at Reuters coined a wonderful catch-phrase that should prove difficult for JPMorgan to explain away to its depositors and to the rest of us –  “JPMorgan dips into cookie jar to offset ‘London Whale’ losses”.

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. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives.

At the large law firm where I began my professional career we were warned about making “career limiting gestures” (CLGs).  I confess to being an expert in committing CLGs, such that I am unemployable in the federal government.  I’m a serial whistle blower who blew the whistle too often and too effectively on too many prominent politicians and bosses running my agency.  One of the proofs of what a great nation America is capable of being is that I survived and the prominent politicians and agency heads who tried so hard to destroy my career and reputation failed.  Indeed, in the process they helped to make me an exemplar that public administration scholars use to illustrate how regulators should function.  The latest act of Congress disinviting me from speaking truth to power has caused me to ruminate on CLGs.  I have concluded that they are essential to effective regulation.

Most Democrats think that they belong to the party of the little guy, the party that attempts to constrain Wall Street.  Sometimes a Democrat won’t fight hard enough, or, like Obama, will make political calculations that shave off the better angels of their nature.  This myth says that Reagan deregulated, and Bush led us into […]

Bloomberg’s Bob Ivry has a great piece out on mortgage whistleblower Sherry Hunt, who just won a false claims suit against Citigroup. By 2006, the bank was buying mortgages from outside lenders with doctored tax forms, phony appraisals and missing signatures, she says. It was Hunt’s job to identify these defects, and she did, in […]