"Words that make actions speak louder."
President Barack Obama identified five major problems on Wall Street in his speech at Cooper Union today. Unfortunately, the solutions he has proposed to these problems either will not work, or are not included in the legislation that passed the Senate Banking Committee under the stewardship of Chris Dodd (D-CT). Here they are, one-by-one: Too […]
Despite strong rhetoric against aggressive Wall Street lobbying and deceptive Republican attacks, President Barack Obama appears ready to declare victory on a tepid and ineffective financial reform bill. The aims Obama outlined in his April 22 Cooper Union speech are laudable, but the legislation that cleared the Senate Banking Committee under the stewardship of Chris […]
Tuesday’s hearing on Lehman Brothers’ now infamous Repo 105 scam was only tangentially related to the megabank’s accounting deceptions and subsequent collapse. That story is simple: Lehman almost certainly committed fraud, regulators failed to stop it, and many of the people who screwed up under President George W. Bush inexplicably remain in power under President […]
11:05 Rep. Anna Eshoo is laying out the case against Lehman. The company engineered a host of sham transactions to temporarily reduce the company’s massive leverage levels. Top-level management knew the transactions were totally meaningless, but engaged in them to make the company look more sound. They allowed Lehman to move about $50 billion in […]
The Hill published a truly outrageous op-ed yesterday by a payday lending front group, and didn’t bother to tell their readers their publication was providing a platform for a predatory hatchet-woman. The post is here. It’s an open assault on the very idea of consumer protection regulation in finance, but before I go after the […]
I generally find Andy Kroll to be both a rigorous and persuasive journalist. He knows what he’s talking about on Wall Street reform, and he routinely pens informative yet approachable articles about very complicated subjects. So I was both surprised and disappointed to see his piece from this past Thursday, in which he argues that […]
The next few weeks will be crucial for the effort to rein in the Wall Street casino and hold the bailout barons accountable. Here’s a list of major Wall Street reform rallies taking place around the country in the coming weeks. With the Wall Street bill going to the Senate floor, make sure your voice […]
The political battle over Wall Street reform is finally being engaged in earnest. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has formally thrown in his party’s lot with the nation’s largest banks, and to their credit, Democrats appear to be pushing back, both on politics and policy. McConnell has been arguing this week that the reform […]
There are two types of financial outrages: acts that are outrageously illegal, and acts that are, outrageously, legal. Yesterday’s Senate hearing on the rise and fall of Washington Mutual was a rare examination of the former outrage, documenting the pervasive practice of fraud at every level of the now-defunct bank’s business. All of Washington Mutual’s […]
4:25 Levin is ripping Killinger on option-ARM delinquencies. WaMu performed a study concluding that option-ARMs were about to default like crazy, and right after that study, WaMu started pushing option-ARM securities hard to investors. The company sold a $3 billion batch of these securities on an “urgent” basis, according to internal emails, which is a […]