While it’s gratifying to see former UBS trader Tom Hayes go to jail for large-scale Libor bid rigging, his bosses had to have known what he was up to. So when will we see their indictments?
Read more...Let us not kid ourselves that the Democratic party is also for the most part out to gut financial regulation.
The only reason that there is more space between Congressional Republicans and Democrats than usual is the pro-business, pro-bank “blue dog” wing of the Democratic party has gotten deservedly slaughtered in the last two Congressional elections for selling out what used to be the American middle class. So the more progressive-minded survivors are a bigger faction on a relative basis than they once were.
This Real News Network interview with Bill Black covers both a critical slice of the history of financial regulations (or more accurately, its rollback) as well as some of the current dynamics.
Read more...A detailed account of the long and tortured history of budget fakery in Greece and how it is has been aggressively defended by successive Greek governments. A tidbit from the post: one section is labeled “When revising wrong statistics is treason.”
Read more...The long-anticipated verdict in the AIG bailout trial came yesterday, and the Fed is not happy.
Read more...Michael Hudson gives a wide-ranging interview on the state of financial capital, with emphasis on fresh events in Ukraine and Russia.
Read more...We are now 35 years into a finance-led counterrevolution. If you care about income inequality, student loan debt slavery, foreclosure abuses, and other products of the success of this effort, it behooves you, as Sun Tzu urged, to understand your enemy.
Read more...Current proposals to deal with the too big to fail problem fall way short as far as disarming derivatives risk is concerned.
Read more...Three SEC whistleblowers have been proven right in charging Deutsche Bank with misreporting its biggest derivatives risk,. the bank, predictably, looks to have gotten off easy.
Read more...Elizabeth Warren makes a bold call for wide-ranging, serious financial reform.
Read more...As strange as it may seem, most economists loudly disputed the notion that the rise in commodity prices, particularly in the first half of 2008, was in large measure due to financial speculation. More and more analytical work (such as comparisons of price action in commodities trades on futures exchanges with ones that have large markets but are not exchange-traded, like eggplant, a staple in India, and cooking oil) have dented the orthodox view.
Read more...Citigroup tried to get back at Elizabeth Warren and her allies for daring to call out The Bank That Must Not Be Named. The move looks to have backfired.
Read more...How the FCIC not merely ignored but actually suppressed information that revealed what and more important, who, drove the crisis.
Read more...This post by Ed Walker provides a detailed description of how badly municipalities have been fleeced when they bought interest rate swaps from Wall Street as part of financings. It isn’t simply that these borrowers were exploited, but that the degree of pilfering was so extreme that the financiers clearly knew they were dealing with rubes and took full advantage of the opportunity.
But what is even more troubling than the fact set here is the failure of the overwhelming majority of abused borrowers to seek to recover their losses. Walker describes that multiple legal approaches lead you to the same general conclusion: the swaps provider, as opposed to the hapless city, should bear the brunt of the losses. So why haven’t cities like Chicago, that have been hit hard by swaps losses, fought back? Walker does not speculate, but in the case of Rahm Emanuel, it’s not hard to imagine that his deep ties to Big Finance are the reason.
Read more...The battle between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ of global financial policy is escalating to the point where the ‘haves’ might start to sweat – a tiny little. This phase of heightened volatility in the markets is a harbinger of the inevitable meltdown that will follow the grand plastering-over of a systemically fraudulent global financial system.
Read more...This Institute of New Economic Thinking interview describes how Argentina’s completed sovereign debt restructuring was derailed by vulture fund NML Capital in a reading of the original bonds’ pari passu clause that was contrary to well-established practice. Even the US Treasury had weighed in on the side of Argentina in an amicus brief. The interview of Argentine ambassador Cecilia Nahon by Marshall Auerbach goes into the backstory of the restructuring, that Argentina’s woes in no small measure resulted from following the IMF’s neoliberal fads du jour.
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