Category: News

Commentary By Capitalism Betrayed’s Redleaf and Vigilante in MarketWatch today:
Forget regulation, just make the banks open their books.
By Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante
MINNEAPOLIS, (MarketWatch) — Sen. Dodd’s new and not-very-improved financial reform bill, like the House bill passed last December, is driven by two of the most cherished popular myths of the financial crisis. [...]

The good side of Soros—and CDS
He’s obnoxious politically but you have to love a guy who has done so much over the years to expose sovereign financial finagling and make money doing it.
Predictably the governments of the world are taking seriously the idea of regulating CDS, now that these lie-detectors of the financial world are [...]

This is among the most sober and well-argued pieces we have seen on the flaws of the administration’s financial reform proposals. We thought we might end up disagreeing more strongly when Wallison pulled out the old chestnut of the “moral hazard” supposedly created by too-big-to-fail. We have always been skeptical of the moral hazard explanation [...]

As usual when regulators try to block conflicts of interest they just create a crisis of competence.
Of course investment advisors sell products in which they have a proprietary interest. Mostly it does not matter because it’s all plain vanilla stuff and the advisors know about as much as you can pick up in less expensive [...]

One of the most-read pieces in the financial press this week is Joseph Stiglitz’s interview with Forbes. He starts off just right, making the point that no commentator other than the humble authors of Panic have made: the essence of the crisis was the attempt to have capitalism without ownership, or without strong ownership.  That’s [...]

Progressives and the Growing Dependency Agenda
By George Will

WASHINGTON — Only two things are infinite — the expanding universe and Democrats’ hostility to the District of Columbia’s school choice program. Killing this small program, which currently benefits 1,300 mostly poor and minority children, is odious and indicative. It is a small piece of something large — [...]

Nobody gets Fannie and Freddie better than Peter Wallison. Here Peter explains why the twins should be privatized but won’t be: having their own mortgage bank is just too much fun for Congressmen
Everybody wants to talk about the Fed raising the discount rate.  Bank profits may go down fractionally, otherwise, snore, snore. Point 75 like [...]

Stiglitz, smart as he is, is allowing himself to be distracted by the President’s tendency to wander off in to irrelevant details that make good sound bites. Sure, forbid proprietary trading by commercial banks if you like; it won’t hurt. But it was utterly irrelevant to the crisis. Also the rule would tend to extend [...]

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//  A mention by Maggie Gallagher in “the corner” at NRO.

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// Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante of Capitalism Betrayed weigh in on the news from Massachusetts:
This morning everybody seems to want to know what Scott Brown means—for everything. For the debate on financial reform, he does not mean much. Senate Republicans are not going to filibuster a financial sector reform bill. Not only would it [...]