“U.S. securities regulators are looking into whether turbocharged exchange-traded funds amplified August’s topsy-turvy swings in the stock market.” Read the full article at the The Wall Street Journal
“Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro said Tuesday the agency won’t appeal a federal court decision throwing out the agency’s rule to let shareholders more easily oust corporate directors, but suggested the agency might rewrite the regulation.” Read the full article at the The Wall Street Journal
U.S. securities regulators are looking into whether turbocharged exchange-traded funds amplified August’s topsy-turvy swings in the stock market. Securities and Exchange Commission officials have had discussions with firms that trade ETFs, asking questions about whether they added to the market’s volatility, according to people familiar with the talks. ETFs, which typically track market indexes, trade […]
“More Americans are reaching their 60s with so much debt they can’t afford to retire. Most people used to pay off their debts before retiring. But as wages have barely kept up with rising prices over the past 35 years Americans have pushed debt higher, living beyond their means. Now, people are postponing retirement, cutting […]
“The Supreme Court’s January 2010 Citizens United decision to permit corporations to spend unlimited sums to influence federal elections was premised on a pair of yet-unfulfilled promises: Corporations would disclose their expenditures, and shareholders would be able to police such spending. The best chance to fulfill those promises may now rest with the Securities and […]
“Senate Republicans expressed support Tuesday for President Obama’s nominee to lead the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau but remained opposed to his confirmation without significant changes to the agency.” Read the full story at The Washington Post
“A year after it was warned that it might be violating federal law, the Securities and Exchange Commission is still breaking the law by destroying records of closed enforcement cases, a lawyer in the agency’s enforcement division has alleged.” Read the full story at The Washington Post
“Germany’s high court on Wednesday upheld the country’s participation in last year’s bailout of Greece and the eurozone rescue fund, but ruled that a budget committee had to vet any future decisions to commit any more taxpayer money.” Read the full story at The Washington Post
“Nearly one in three Americans who grew up middle-class has slipped down the income ladder as an adult, according to a new report by the Pew Charitable Trusts.” Read the full story at The Washington Post
“The Federal Reserve is moving toward new steps aimed at lowering interest rates on mortgages and other kinds of long-term loans, without making another massive infusion of money into the economy.” Read the the full story at The Washington Post
“The US mortgage crisis has entered a new stage. US banks are still flailing in the toxic sludge of bad assets that heralded the financial crisis. But now they are having to deal with a barrage of litigation that will determine how big their losses will be. The optimists say settlements are being reached, banks […]
“On August 3, the London Stock Exchange announced it would purchase a transaction reporting system from the Financial Services Authority, again throwing transaction reporting into the spotlight. Long before this sale however, the FSA began planning for a revamped monitoring and surveillance system. On August 8, the FSA’s transaction monitoring unit launched Zen.” Read the […]
“European regulators are pushing for the removal of barriers to competition in derivatives traded on exchanges and for greater transparency in bond trading as part of sweeping reforms to market structures in the region.” Read the full article at The Financial Times
“The truth is that France’s banks – like those of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Greece before them – have been caught up for the past five weeks in a vicious circle of market nervousness, with their shares and their supply of short-term funding, particularly from US money market funds, plummeting in parallel.” Read the […]
“Global bank regulators are preparing to ease new rules that would require banks to hold more liquid assets to withstand a funding crunch in a crisis. The move follows complaints from banks that the new Basel III standards on liquidity – the first international rules of their kind – would force them to sharply curtail […]
“Europe’s bailouts of struggling euro-zone countries could face fresh obstacles on Wednesday, when Germany’s constitutional court rules on the bailouts’ legality.” Read the full story at The Wall Street Journal
“Mr. Cordray’s background, which has gained him widespread bipartisan support outside of Washington, is unlikely to be the main focus of the Senate Banking Committee hearing. Instead, senators are likely to spend much of the session debating the basic structure of the agency.” Read the full article at The Wall Street Journal
“One idea that sounds easy enough: stimulate consumer spending and stem further carnage in the housing market by allowing more homeowners to refinance. The government, relying on mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, could refinance millions of loans, freeing up cash for more consumers.” Read the full story at The Wall Street Journal
“When the Securities and Exchange Commission was accused last year of improperly destroying records, in particular those related to certain initial inquiries into possible wrongdoing, the agency responded with a reassuring letter….But earlier, unsent drafts of the SEC’s Aug. 27, 2010, letter told a different story about the handling of records, which has come under […]
“Public pessimism about the direction of the country has jumped to its highest level in nearly three years, erasing the sense of hope that followed President Obama’s inauguration and pushing his approval ratings to a record low, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.” Read the full story at The Washington Post
“Last April, economics majors at Princeton University crowded into a campus auditorium to watch “Inside Job,” a documentary about the financial meltdown, and then listen to a panel discussion between their department’s leading professors. “Paul Krugman, the school’s Nobel Prize-winning professor and one of the loudest liberal critics of President Obama from his perch at […]
“I’ve spent a chunk of summer vacation visiting old friends here, and I can’t help feeling that national politicians and national journalists alike have dropped the ball on jobs. Some 25 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed — that’s more than 16 percent of the work force — but jobs haven’t been nearly high enough […]
“No doubt, some of this richer hawk-dove debate is occurring behind closed doors at the Fed and in Jackson Hole. But the public conversation still matters. It affects nothing less than the Fed’s credibility. Mr. Bernanke knows that if he errs on the side of passivity — worrying more about inflation risks than unemployment — […]
“He is one of millions for whom the recession has become permanent, no longer a crisis to endure so much as a reality to accept.” Read the full story at The Washington Post
“Auditors and regulators have come under fire for allowing European financial institutions to take wildly divergent approaches to Greek government bond writedowns.” Read the full story at The Financial Times
“A few years ago, I pointed out in a column that the cost of insuring the US government against a default in the credit derivatives market, had risen above that of McDonalds, the US fast food company, for the first time.” Read the full story at The Financial Times
“The industry conference known as Sefcon is devoted to the relatively obscure swap execution facility, or SEF, the electronic derivatives marketplace designated under the Dodd-Frank Act, the sweeping financial regulatory overhaul. With Washington cracking down on derivatives, Sefcon’s nod to Defcon was not coincidental.” Read the full story at The New York Times
“On this Labor Day, there is little good news about labor. We have entered a long period of crushing unemployment and downward pressure on wages that may well transform the nation’s economic and political landscape. There was no job growth in August, and the overall numbers are stupefying: 14 million unemployed; nearly 9 million part-time workers […]
“The dust from Iceland’s spectacular financial disaster — the failure of its three biggest banks and then the collapse of its economy in the fall of 2008 — had barely begun to settle when the country set about finding someone to blame.”
“THIS Labor Day should be an uncomfortable day for our political leaders, and for comfortable readers of this newspaper, too. Working people are enduring hard times, maybe the hardest in decades. Meanwhile, our national political debate seems utterly out of touch with the economic pain now being endured by millions of precariously employed, under-employed and […]
“THE 5 percent of Americans with the highest incomes now account for 37 percent of all consumer purchases, according to the latest research from Moody’s Analytics. That should come as no surprise. Our society has become more and more unequal. When so much income goes to the top, the middle class doesn’t have enough purchasing […]
“Friday brought two numbers that should have everyone in Washington saying, ‘My God, what have we done?’ One of these numbers was zero — the number of jobs created in August. The other was two — the interest rate on 10-year U.S. bonds, almost as low as this rate has ever gone. Taken together, these […]
“US money market funds say they cut their exposure to eurozone banks for a second consecutive month in August, reducing the availability of credit as the stress in the region’s banking system increasingly affects stronger countries such as France.” Read the full story at The Financial Times
“Alistair Darling has launched a stinging attack on Sir Mervyn King, claiming the Bank of England governor did not understand the unfolding financial crisis in 2007, took the wrong policy action and ended up undermining the Bank’s independence by endorsing Conservative banking reforms.” Read the full story at The Financial Times
“A recent and acrimonious dispute among state officials over a possible legal settlement to address nationwide mortgage abuses is underscoring basic questions about what the effort should accomplish. In settling claims against the largest banks related to ”robo-signed foreclosure documents and other flawed paperwork, should officials seek to rectify all the wrongs of the mortgage crisis? […]
“Tempers can flare in the debate over banking. ‘Barking mad‘ was the description attached to one likely proposal by the head of the CBI. John Cridland is right in a way; something about this discussion is insane. Mr Cridland’s hot words came in response to a likely proposal from the UK government’s Independent Commission on Banking: […]
“The government would be “barking mad” to press ahead with proposals to ringfence British banks’ retail arms from other banking operations given the darkening economic clouds over the economy, John Cridland, director-general of Britain’s biggest business lobby group, has warned.” Read the full story at The Financial Times
“Many ask whether high-income countries are at risk of a “double dip” recession. My answer is: no, because the first one did not end. The question is, rather, how much deeper and longer this recession or “contraction” might become. The point is that, by the second quarter of 2011, none of the six largest high-income […]
“With just a fortnight to go before the Independent Commission on Banking issues its final report on how to make the UK’s financial system safer, the lobbying shows no sign of easing up.” Read the full story at The Financial Times
“The battle has therefore moved on from whether banks should ringfence their retail arms to the speed at which this should happen. The bankers have duly been impressing on politicians that to move fast might threaten the supply of credit to the economy. The implied threat is that you can have safe banks or growth, […]
“Europe’s candidate to lead the International Monetary Fund was not, after all, Europe’s stooge. In no time, Christine Lagarde has embraced views that differ refreshingly from what eurozone leaders dare to say, or even think.” Read the full story at The Financial Times
“The threat of losing your home is stressful enough to make you ill, it stands to reason. Now two economists have measured just how unhealthy the foreclosure crisis has been in some of the hardest-hit areas of the U.S.” Read the full story at The Wall Street Journal
“The Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer who has accused the regulator of improperly destroying thousands of sensitive documents is a proven whistleblower: He received an award of around $2.7 million for exposing possible fraud in a previous job.” Read the full story at The Wall Street Journal
“A battle is heating up over whether investors in oil and other commodities markets should be required to lift the veil of secrecy that shrouds their trading bets. The debate has simmered in the three years since oil prices spiked to record highs in 2008, sparking concerns that speculators were driving the move. But it […]
“Edward J. DeMarco has spent a career in the shadows of government, bouncing from one obscure post to another. Now, as the accidental head of the most powerful finance agency in housing, he controls the future of an industry weighing down the U.S. economy.” Read the full story at The Wall Street Journal
“Federal Reserve officials are as deeply divided as they’ve been in decades about how to spur the flagging economy, records released Tuesday show, as they stake out positions on what, if any, action to take at their September meeting.” Read the full story at The Wall Street Journal
“Judge Nancy Gertner of Federal District Court in Boston on Friday denied a request by Mr. Quattrone and his co-defendants to dismiss a decade-old lawsuit that charges his former bank, Credit Suisse First Boston, with issuing misleading stock research on AOL–Time Warner. The case now proceeds to trial.” Read the full story at The New York Times
“The legal onslaught continues for Bank of America. On Tuesday, several homeowners filed suit in Federal District Court in Manhattan, seeking to block a proposed $8.5 billion settlement between Bank of America and major mortgage investors, including BlackRock, Pimco and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The suit says the deal fails to address widespread servicing […]
“The attorney general of Nevada is accusing Bank of America of repeatedly violating a broad loan modification agreement it struck with state officials in October 2008 and is seeking to rip up the deal so that the state can proceed with a suit against the bank over allegations of deceptive lending, marketing and loan servicing practices.” Read the full […]
“At their meeting this month, Federal Reserve policy makers were in strong disagreement, with some advocating aggressive options to stimulate the economy and others pressing to do nothing, according to minutes released on Tuesday.” Read the full story at The New York Times
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