Posts by Matthew Blake

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) is again focusing on the hard-to-fathom salaries of financial executives, writing to the CEO’s of the nine banks that were partly nationalized as part of the Treasury Dept.’s $700- billion rescue plan.
Waxman, chair of the House oversight committee, points out that Treasury spent a combined $121 billion to buttress these banks, [...]

The Clean Air Act is one of the signature laws that gives regulatory authority to the Environmental Protection Agency.
But the Bush administration, especially under EPA head Stephen Johnson, has weakened ozone standards and ignored a U.S. Supreme Court order to use the law to regulate greenhouse gases that cause global warming.  Even though Johnson and [...]

In four hours of testimony before the House oversight committee, the former Fed chairman admitted that his belief that markets will self-regulate was flawed. But as the hearing wore on, he was back to his old confident self, fending off calls for more regulation.

“Partially,” answered Alan Greenspan, the former oracle and maestro of the Federal Reserve between 1987-2006.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a great hearing yesterday on the role that the credit rating agencies played in the financial system’s meltdown. Today’s hearing on federal regulators on Wall Street has been more theater so far.

At the end of a five-hour excoriation of CEOs at credit-rating agencies, Rep. Chris Shays (R-Conn.) said to the heads of Moody’s, Standard’s & Poor’s and Fitch: “Remember, we’re speaking from an institution, Congress, with lower ratings than yours.”
Congress doesn’t know what its next step will be in regulating Wall Street after the financial meltdown. [...]

The House oversight committee released a smattering of documents today from two big credit-rating agencies– Moody’s and Standard & Poor — on how they evaluated mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps. One letter shows that S&P decided to lower its standard in rating mortgage-backed securities simply to compete with Moody’s.

“Is this simply a case that they got the assumptions wrong?” Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) asked a panel of experts on credit-rating agencies at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing. “Or is there more to the story they’re not sharing with us?”
The panel, and most lawmakers on the committee, seem to agree that [...]

Confused about the financial crisis? The rise of mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps? So, it appears, were the credit ratings agencies — the companies that rated these financial instruments.
Since the federal government didn’t have authority to regulate the secondary mortgage market, it was up to the big CRA’s, like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, [...]

The $488-billion for defense was just tacked on to a larger spending bill at the last minute, with no separate vetting by appropriations committees. The lack of oversight leads to increased funding for programs repeatedly criticized by Defense Sec. Robert Gates.

Scott Bloch, director of the Office of Special Counsel, is now set to resign, effective Jan. 5. Bloch has drawn some unwanted attention to the federal agency that investigates whistleblower complaints from federal employees, including examples of partisan politicking in the bureaucracy. He hired “Geeks on Call” to scrub his computer files and was [...]