Well, at least you have to give the mandarins at the Bank of England points for honesty. They’ve actually admitted they don’t give a rat’s ass for the welfare of old people who had prudently hoped to live off income from their investments. Admittedly, the retirees might have been kidding themselves a wee bit, since […]
Read more...It is increasingly evident that the appointment of Elizabeth Warren to act as special advisor to the President and Treasury for the newly-established Consumer Financial Protection Agency has everything to do with Obama trying to shore up his questionable credentials as a reformer and perilous little with helping ordinary citizens. So the only question that […]
Read more...The body language of the Administration has been clear from the outset on the question of whether Elizabeth Warren would get its nomination to head of the new financial services consumer protection agency. Despite the occasional public remark regarding her undeniable competence, which really amounted to damning her with faint praise, Team Obama has never […]
Read more...This post first appeared on March 11, 2008 Oooh, the week has barely started and we’ve already had an overdose of adrenaline-generating news. Thornburg Mortgage and Carlyle Capital, both twisting in the wind, battered by margin calls, look unlikely to escape bankruptcy (Thornburg has already defaulted on financing agreements; Carlyle is seeking a standstill). Freddie […]
Read more...The banks giveth and the banks taketh away, big time. This chart from a Wall Street Journal article on credit card interest rates says a great deal: Even though banks are getting all kinds of bennies from the Fed and regulators, such as a nice steep yield curve and lots of regulatory forbearance (econ-speak for […]
Read more...I’m surprised this move, of cell phone providers getting into the payments game, hasn’t come sooner. Visa and MaserCard charge fees vastly in excess of their costs, which is usually an invitation to competition, but payment services have high barriers to entry. But cell phone carriers already have some of the key elements of the […]
Read more...It should come as no surprise that a financial services industry powerful enough to water down meaningful reform in the US and internationally (Basel III rules were weakened to allow, for instance, that mortgage servicing rights be included in regulatory capital calculations) would probably have its way in blocking the nomination of Elizabeth Warren as […]
Read more...To say there is no love lost between Treasury and Elizabeth Warren is probably putting it mildly. Treasury was gunning for her ouster in early 2009; I heard multiple accounts both of how concerted the Administration opposition to her was (recall she was actually chosen as head of the Congressional Oversight Panel before the regime […]
Read more...While the headline focuses on her outlook for housing, Whitney is bearish across the board, seeing little reason to cheer on the employment and bank earnings fronts. She sees a 10% fall in housing prices in the next six months (!), which will hit bank earnings (Whitney has argued since at least early 2009 that […]
Read more...Today provided yet another example of how the best government money can buy works. The Senate majority leader Harry Reid suffered an embarrassing defeat when his effort to pass a motion for cloture, which would have stopped debate on the financial reform bill, failed due to two Democrat and one Republican defection among the votes […]
Read more...The Institute on Assets and Social Policy published a report on Monday based on economic data from the same 2000 families from 1984 to 2007 (hat tip Michael Powell). Its sobering results likely understates the case, since it does not include the post financial crisis period. The study found that the median wealth gap between […]
Read more...I’ve recounted my own sorry experience with Chase, in which branch staff repeatedly misrepresented its business checking product. I’ve closed that account, but Chase nevertheless managed to extract some fees on a supposedly “fee free” account. Another example of Chase’s aggressive and less than upstanding conduct comes from a reader via e-mail: I have been […]
Read more...Bloomberg provides a summary of a report by Morgan Stanley that has tried to quantify the level of strategic defaults. The analysis seeks to identify borrowers who walk away from mortgages that they can arguably afford, and defines that group as those who go from paying on time to missing three mortgage payments in a […]
Read more...Andrew Dittmer, who was an important collaborator on ECONNED, sent me pdfs of the notorious Citigroup Plutonomy reports for leisure reading. Michael Moore highlighted these two research reports (2005 and 2006) in Capitalism: A Love Story . On the one hand, the authors, Ajay Kapur, Niall Macleod, and Narendra Singh get some credit for addressing […]
Read more...By Tim Duncan, Chairman of American Business Leaders for Financial Reform Financial regulatory reform was starting to feel a lot like a political version of the movie Groundhog Day. Like Bill Murray’s character in the movie – forced inexplicably to live the same day over and over until he learned from his mistakes – the […]
Read more...