Neil Barofsky met with several Occupy Wall Street working groups Sunday for nearly two hours. Barofsky is relaxed, thoughtful, and direct a Q&A format.
One of his major themes was that the unwillingness to mete out meaningful punishments to miscreant banks means that the authorities are providing incentives to engage in criminal activity.
Read more...Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller.
Last week’s big revelation on banking is that it is now official Department of Justice policy under Obama that big banks and their executives are above the law.
Read more...Yves here. One of the things that has too often gone missing in the many discussions of why massive scale money launderer HSBC was not prosecuted is the basis of the “doing that would be destabilizing” excuse. When a company is indicted (mind you, indicted, not convicted), pretty much all Federal and many (most?) state agencies are required to stop doing business with it, immediately. The effect of the loss of so much business, particularly for a large financial firm, is seen as a death knell.
Of course, that’s the point.
Read more...I’ve read the Department of Labor complaint of former Deutsche Bank employee Eric Ben-Artzi that, among other things, alleges that the German bank violated SEC, GAAP and IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) requirements and probably also Sarbanes Oxley, and have had follow up conversations with him and his counsel. The charges are specific and sufficiently well supported to merit serious investigation. In their efforts to dismiss his charges, defenders of the bank’s position overlook the public reporting requirements for complex financial transactions like the one in question, a leveraged super senior (LSS) trade. Nor does their Panglossian “everything worked out for the best” argument stand up to scrutiny.
Read more...Bankers are now hoist on their own austerity petard. The fact that ordinary citizen all across the Eurozone are seeing lower incomes, lower levels of social services, and can expect only more of the same seems to have led to a sudden outburst of resolve to make sure that bankers take the pain along with everyone else.
Read more...American Banker has an article up that is astonishing in that it tells us that the main regulator of national banks, the OCC, has confirmed one of our ongoing complaints: that the controls at the biggest banks are inexcusably weak. The OCC is the last place you’d expect to hear this from; historically it’s been a major enabler of banks playing fast and loose with the rules. And the implication is that bank execs should be wearing orange jumpsuits rather than getting multi-million pay packages.
Read more...By Neil Barofsky, former Special Inspector General for the Troubled Assets Relief Program, currently a senior fellow at the NYU School of Law and the author of Bailout. Cross posted from The New Republic with author permission
You can be forgiven if you watched the Department of Justice’s announcement yesterday of a $1.92 billion settlement with HSBC with a sense of disappointment–and déjà vu.
Read more...Believe it or not, sometimes I’m not cynical enough.
Read more...In my last post on Basel III, I suggested that we would soon see a silly game played out over the coming months whereby banks on either side of the Atlantic would alternate in securing more and more concessions on Basel III until the whole thing became manifestly pointless and got sidelined.
In fact it is all happening rather faster than that.
Read more...A default position among what passes for finance cognoscenti in the blogosphere is to argue that media stories pointing up bank improprieties are making a mountain out of a molehill. The form of the argument is usually, “If you only understood XYZ technical issue, this is not such a big deal.” Now that isn’t to say that position is wrong; we’ve more than occasionally made just that type of argument. But if you are going to go that route, it’s incumbent on you to take account of the relevant background; otherwise, whether you intend to or not, your argument can wind up being the equivalent of “Look, over there!”
We’ve seen this type of diversion-as-argumentation take place on the brewing Deutsche Bank scandal over losses that three separate whistleblowers allege that that bank hid from investors during the crisis. Matt Levine and Felix Salmon say, to use Levine’s turn of phrase, that all the German bank did was ignore the losses until they went away. That is a misrepresentation of what actually happened.
Read more...It seems the Federal Government has finally woken up and is making a show of being serious about one type of bank misbehavior, that of money laundering. The striking element about the agreementwith various Federal agencies and the Department of Justice is that nearly $1.3 billion of the $1.9 million fine comes in the form of a deferred prosecution agreement.
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. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
The New York Times produces profiles of national leaders like Italy’s Mario Monti and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa. I invite readers to contrast the worshipful treatment accorded Monti with the Correa profile. The next time someone tells you the NYT is a “leftist” paper you can show them how far right it is on financial issues.
Read more...Lively and provocative. Do yourself a favor and watch it. Hat tip Richard Smith via creditplumber.
Read more...Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller.
In the comments of my last post on the SEC nomination issue, director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America, Barbara Roper, laid out a rationale for different choices at the SEC. R
Read more...Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller
I’ve been trying to figure out what is going on with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the past month or so, because it is the biggest weakness in our regulatory apparatus. In an interview with Neil Barofsky at Salon, he says that he would take the SEC job if offered. His plan for reform would involve rearranging enforcement priorities at the agency, and reexamine the policy whereby the SEC does not bring cases against corporations but settles without forcing an admission of guilt on particular facts.
This policy has turned the SEC into an agency that issues parking tickets.
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