regulatory capture

Appraisers are pursuing class action suits against banks, asserting they were blacklisted if they refused to engage in fraudulent appraisals. The problem is that if they win, they are then subject to suit by homeowners (who are losing their…

The Obama administration’s record of prosecuting elite financial frauds is worse than the Bush administration’s record, which is a very large statement. Neither administration has prosecuted any elite CEO for the epidemic of mortgage fraud…

Bill Moyers talks to former Citicorp and Citigroup head John Reed about what's wrong in the banking sector. John Reed readily acknowledges his role in bringing down the Glass-Steagall Act (Hat tip finance Addict).

Fannie and Freddie have already been nationalized and the government is already on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars of losses as a result. Clearly, this makes it a lot easier to use the GSEs as vehicles to pump money into the…

I was thinking about that last post I wrote on the euro zone and regulatory forbearance. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So here's a picture that captures my thinking pretty well.

A quote from Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who centrally controlled and underpriced the most over-leveraged interest rate in the world for 18 years and is now cashing in like a reality TV celebrity

So here’s the deal. What happened is that the financial sector taken as a whole moved into extremely short-term finance of positions in assets. This is a huge topic and is related to the transformation of investment banking partnerships…

the banks now browbeat governments – not by having ready cash but by threatening to go bust and drag the economy down with them if they are not given control of public tax policy, spending and planning. The process has gone furthest in the…

You have probably heard a lot of noise about what was said about the housing bubble at Federal Reserve meetings in 2006. There is a quote from Timothy Geithner, then the NY Fed chief, that I think is quite revealing.

Is there any government body having a harder time of it these days than the SEC? Sometimes it feels like someone pinned a giant “Kick me” sign to its collective back. I’ve written previously about a key factor that I think is partly…