"Words that make actions speak louder."
2:00 FCIC Commissioners today have been much more aggressive than they’ve been in any hearing thus far. Watching Bill Thomas go after Fannie Mae exec Robert Levin on lobbying was really satisfying. But where was this tenacity yesterday, or in February? The way Thomas rambled on endlessly in previous hearings, it almost seemed like he […]
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission hearings continue to be a broad, boring failure, peppered with a few moments of significant insight. Throughout most of yesterday’s hearing featuring the nation’s top bank regulator, Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan, Commissioners treated their witness as a credible expert, rather than a culpable catalyst of the crash. You’d […]
A grotesque deception from Dugan’s opening statement: “The rapid increase in market share by these unregulated brokers and originators put pressure on regulated banks to lower their underwriting standards, which they did, though not to the same extent as was true for unregulated mortgage lenders.” Dugan is correct to note that many subprime lenders like […]
The top U.S. bank regulator, John Dugan, hasn’t even started testifying before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, but he’s already spinning deceptions. Dugan worked as a bank lobbyist for years before being appointed to his current job by President George W. Bush. Dugan runs an agency called the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency […]
Finally! Nearly two years after one of the worst financial crashes in history—and nearly three years after the crisis broke out—the SEC has charged a major bank with accounting fraud. On Wednesday, the SEC charged Regions Financial subsidiary Morgan Keegan with fraudulently overvaluing its holdings subprime mortgage securities. The company was running several big investment […]
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) is the top bank regulatory agency in the United States. It oversees the largest banks in the country, and completely failed to regulate them effectively in the years leading up to the Great Financial Crash of 2008. Its banks ultimately needed hundreds of billions in bailout […]
Robert Rubin and Chuck Prince ran the financial giant Citigroup in the years leading up to the Great Financial Crash of 2008. Together, their leadership proved so disastrous that the company was forced to beg for one of the largest bailouts in economic history. Under Rubin and Prince, Citigroup made just about every wrong-headed bet […]
I rarely accuse Paul Krugman of failing to think clearly, but he’s missed the mark with his his argument against breaking up the U.S. too-big-to-fail financial oligarchy. Here’s Krugman’s core objection: Breaking up big banks wouldn’t really solve our problems, because it’s perfectly possible to have a financial crisis that mainly takes the form of […]
The latest letter from J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon to his company’s shareholders is a deliberate effort to obfuscate his own bank’s rapaciousness and deflect attention from the enormous sums it has spent lobbying against financial reform. But despite the bank’s history of predatory excess, Dimon’s revisionist economic history carries significant—and unwarranted— political influence […]
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., unveiled his latest financial reform proposal on Monday, and the stakes for the new legislation couldn’t be higher. After consumer groups raised a major ruckus, Dodd has dropped one of his most egregious concessions to the bank lobby—cutting enforcement authority from the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). […]