banks

Here, Maxine Waters, a U.S. Congresswoman from Los Angeles gets hot under the collar about the banking industry given its predatory lending (credit cards and housing) in her constituency. You may remember she was very skeptical about the…

We heard testimony before the House Banking Committee in Washington today. The CEOs of eight large financial institutions are being raked over the coals by Congress. It was a scene which reminded me of the Pecora Hearings during the Great…

Politico asked a bunch of pundits from across the political spectrum to size up U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's performance in explaining his plan for rescuing the U.S. banking system. They were asked, "Did Tim Geithner blow it? What…

Martin Wolf of the Financial Times has issued a damning assessment of the Geithner bailout package. His main criticism is that Geithner's aims are the same narrow set of goals set out by the Bush Administration of working through this…

Caroline Baum has a good column today at Bloomberg.com regarding public anger in America.  She correctly states that the American public is not just angry at Wall Street, but at what Wall Street represents in terms of special interests,…

I watched the proceedings of the UK Treasury Committee with HBOS and RBS this morning on Bloomberg UK TV and it was a dismal sight. It had the feel of the Nuremburg trials, honestly. The clip below doesn't do justice to how tense the…

The FDIC has closed another bank. This time it is FirstBank of Georgia. The bank only had $285 million in deposits, so this was no titan. Regional powerhouse Regions Financial has assumed the deposits, which is positive because last week…

The "Buy American" clause stuck onto the stimulus bill wending its way through Congress is a pernicious piece of legislation because it has engendered a ferocious response from trading partners, not the least of which is Canada. Below is a…

There is a lot of anecdotal fodder in support of my last post tagging deregulation as a root cause for the build up of excesses in the financial services industry. Let me give you one example from 1998.

There is a view making the rounds now that repealing the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 is the root cause for all of the excesses we have experienced -- and by extension for the present economic Depression. Glass-Steagall was enacted in 1933…