This afternoon, the U.S. Senate passed a sweeping financial regulatory reform bill, overhauling the regulation of everything from the biggest banks to consumer financial products to exotic instruments like credit-default swaps to the derivatives used by farmers. The bill passed 60 to 39.
[Congress1] Earlier on Thursday, Republicans Olympia More…
This morning, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner published an opinion piece in The Washington Post. In it, he argues:
Ending “too big to fail” also requires building stronger shock absorbers throughout the system so it can better withstand the next financial storm. To do that, the Senate bill closes loopholes
In the wake of the request by European leaders to institute (at a minimum) mandatory reporting and more regulation of credit default swaps, the Securities and Exchange Commission is jumping on the regulation bandwagon. In a statement by its chair, Mary Schapiro called for regulation of More…
The least complex explanation for derivatives, and particularly the credit default swaps that drove this financial crisis, is that they are a form of unregulated insurance — they are designed to insure investors against risk by guaranteeing a payout in exchange for premium-like payments. But the lack of regulation of More…
In a long story in Der Spiegel about how currency swaps were used by the governments of the Eurozone to balance their books rather than hedge their bets and how credit default swaps are being used to undermine governments and the euro, the authors note that even as Goldman More…
Nick Baumann of Mother Jones reports that the latest vehicle to try to soak American investors — after Citi’s plans to develop derivatives (a type of insurance product) to allow investors to make money betting on future financial crises — is a movie derivatives market developed More…
Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story’s New York Times piece yesterday was a thorough explanation of Goldman Sachs’ machinations that contributed to the collapse of AIG and the government’s perceived need to jump in and pay for everything without negotiating prices.
But unless you’re well-versed in the modern minutiae More…
For many people, one of the confounding things about the financial crisis has been trying to grasp exactly what happened on Wall Street — and how things could have gotten so out of hand. The financial press, in many ways, hasn’t been of much help here, throwing around terms like More…
Too big to fail? Maybe. Too big to regulate? Not according to some lawmakers.
Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) introduced legislation today authorizing federal regulators to oversee the credit default swaps market — which has ballooned into a $57 trillion industry.
We know that Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), burned by voter anger over his coziness with Wall Street, received only $4,250 in donations from actual residents of his home state during the first three months of this year.
That’s not great news for the embattled Dodd, More…
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