This morning, The Wall Street Journal breaks the unfortunate if unsurprising news that big Wall Street banks routinely lower their debt levels shortly before reporting their quarterly statements, making the banks seem less leveraged than they are.
A total of 18 banks, including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, More…
Well, we knew that SEC employees weren’t policing the Lehman Brothers or sharing information on its collapse with the Fed and they weren’t getting Goldman to disclose how much money Tim Geithner got AIG to pay them from the U.S. Treasury in a timely fashion, and More…
Anyone who has seen the seminal Schoolhouse Rock video “How a Bill Becomes a Law” likely thinks that, when a bill is signed into law, the government can begin enforcing it. Anyone who’s worked in Washington, including former Fed chairman and Obama economic adviser Paul Volcker, More…
In testimony before the House Financial Services Committee yesterday, former Fed chairman and Obama economic adviser Paul Volcker said that Congress needed to pass legislation that sets forth rules for banks, rather than authorizing regulatory authorities to eventual develop rules, because “there’s a lot of pressure [for regulators] More…
The extraordinarily comprehensive bankruptcy examiner’s report on Lehman Brothers is the gift that keeps on giving to financial reform advocates, above and beyond even the revelations that Lehman was cooking its books and no one noticed for years. According to Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism, the report is More…
A House Oversight and Government Reform hearing on the controversial merger between Bank of America and Merrill Lynch has been postponed “due to additional documents recently received,” the panel announced today.
The hearing, initially to be held Thursday, has not been rescheduled.
The papers yesterday screamed the news as the two stories broke almost simultaneously. In one plot, the internal watchdog at the Securities and Exchange Commission found that SEC regulators had bungled numerous opportunities to catch Bernie Madoff as he engineered what became a $65 billion Ponzi scheme, leaving More…
With disgraced Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff safely behind bars to serve his 150- year prison sentence, the business of figuring out how he pulled off one of the greatest financial swindles of all time is in full swing. The Washington Post looks at three new books out on More…
During George W. Bush’s ill-fated push to privatize Social Security, conservatives condemned the use of surplus retirement taxes to help offset the deficit. But few Democrats or Republicans decry the government’s custom of padding its coffers with fees from an agency with a mission that’s more significant than ever: the More…
The Obama administration is considering stripping the Securities and Exchange Commission of some its oversight powers, and shifting that responsibility to the Federal Reserve, Bloomberg reports.
The proposal, still being drafted, is likely to give the Federal Reserve more authority to supervise financial firms deemed too big to fail.
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