regulation

Back in December when the Bernard Madoff scandal first hit, I wrote a post, Madoff as a signal to go for “regulation heavy,” suggesting that Madoff was emblematic of a reckless period in the United States, symbolized by the lax oversight of…

This is the name of a speech made by Kansas City Fed CEO Thomas Hoenig which is creating quite a stir. He makes the following points in his speech:

A video from Saturday Night Live.

The quote of the day comes from Marc Faber via Fleet Street News: Meanwhile, the cop who had the Wall Street beat when the biggest heist in history was going on... and who engineered the loans to AIG and GM... is now the chief of police.…

After Iceland collapsed and went into Depression, there were a number of reports in the press regarding countries with outsized financial sectors. The worry was that the collapse of Iceland was not an isolated incident, but rather a…

Just a few hours ago, I posted an article about European toxic asset exposure based on a Telegraph article.  The crux of the Telegraph piece was that European banks have a shed load of bad debt on their books.  A secret European Commission…

A condition of conflict or anxiety resulting from inconsistency between one's duty as regulator and one's actions

Harry Markopolos is a fraud examiner who once worked as a fund manager. He knows fraud when he sees it and he saw it as plain as day with Bernard Madoff, who ran the largest Ponzi scheme in history. In fact, he tipped off the regulators at…

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…