This tidbit from HSBC reveals a new low in the standards of banking, which given how low those already are, amounts to an accomplishment of sorts. Perhaps we should create a Stuart Gulliver Award for other instances of creative extreme seaminess. Nominees?
Read more...The European Central Bank has just launched full-fledged quantitative easing. This column argues that the ECB’s watershed decision highlights both the strengths and the persistent vulnerabilities of the Eurozone. The limited-risk-sharing provision flags the need for greater fiscal union; and governments should use the respite that QE provides to launch much-needed structural reforms.
That’s their story and they’re sticking to it.
Read more...A remarkable (in a bad way) New York Times op-ed shows that Roger Cohen is so deep in the banksters’ pockets that he cannot see that he is a leader in the movement to ensure that no bankster will ever “pay for his sins.”
Read more...Even though there is tacit acceptance, or perhaps more accurately, sullen resignation, about regulators’ failure to make serious investigations into financial firm misconduct (probes on specific issues don’t cut it), occasionally a pundit steps up to remind the public of the farce that passes for bank enforcement.
Read more...It’s really easy to default to cynicism these days, since you are almost always certain to be right. And that goes double as far as bank regulators are concerned.
So that makes it even more important to call attention to exceptions to that sorry rule. One big one is the New York Superintendent of Financial Services, Benjamin Lawsky. As we’ll discuss later in this post, he’s again the subject of a top story in the Financial Times for doing what the banks treat as horrifically unwarranted behavior: punishing them for failing to live up to agreements to reform their conduct. Didn’t he get the memo that that was all theater for the rubes, and no one takes those commitments seriously?
Read more...This story would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic. Yesterday, the Financial Times reported that the New York Fed woke up out of its usual slumber and realized that the crisis has changed nothing and that banks still are in the business of looting have unaddressed ethics issues.
This Real News Network interview with Bill Black provides a good high-level overview of what is right and (mainly) wrong with the $8.9 billion settlement with BNP Paribas over money-laundering charges. Black stresses that financial crime remains a very attractive activity for both the enterprise and its employees. As usual, no executives were charged or even fined, although thanks to the intervention of New York financial services superintendent Benjamin Lawsky, eleven employees of the French bank lost their jobs.
Read more...Yves here. I’ve taken the liberty of editing down Bill Black’s post slightly to bring readers more quickly to his correctly outraged discussion of the latest Wikileaks expose on a trade deal that has managed to go completely under the radar: the Trade in Services Agreement, otherwise known as TISA. We wrote about this troubling news when the story broke. Astonishingly, the mainstream media has taken no notice of this release. Black’s discussion is accessible to lay readers, and I hope you’ll circulate it in the interest of raising awareness of how the Administration intends to sell out the US to banks, Big Pharma, and other multinationals.
Black explains how TISA is designed to replicate, indeed, optimize the criminogenic environment that made fraudulent financial CEOs wealthy by “looting” “their” banks.
Read more...It is perversely considered to be normal to allow private equity general partners to value fund assets on a “trust me” basis. And the limited partners are also awfully trusting in allowing for very thin explanations of distributions (payments) from the funds.
Read more...Yves here. Ilargi is duly skeptical of the enthusiastic financial press response to an increase in home equity liquidation, um, borrowing using home equity lines of credit, or Helocs. While the party line is that this development reflects an rise in home equity and increased consumer confidence, Ilargi stresses that prices appreciation that the Fed has created, the Fed can also take away. I have to wonder how many of these Heloc borrowers are doing so out of necessity or near-desperation.
Read more...We’ve published 12 private equity limited partnership agreements, including the KKR limited partnership agreement that was key to an important Wall Street Journal story. The source documents have been removed from the Pennsylvania Treasury’s website, so our document trove has now become the best source for these records.
Read more...In an important, well-reaserched article, Gretchen Morgenson flags several types of private equity fee abuses. Did the incoming New York Times editor, Dean Baquet, bury her story by running it Memorial Day weekend?
Read more...I’m getting a bad case of déjà vu from reading the Financial Times over the last week.
Read more...Why health care will never work as a market good – there are extreme information asymmetries between the providers and the patients. That means, among other things, we need to recognize the inability of patients to know if they are getting good care or not (beyond a basic level of attentiveness) and the ease of getting them to believe that a lot of treatment, as in overtreatment, is tantamount to “good care”.
Read more...“Privatization” and “public-private-partnerships” for infrastructure and other public assets are scams driven by private greed and public cowardice.
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