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 [...]
How is it that one man can be so wrong, so often, about such obvious things. Here he takes up the mantra that of course we need a consumer financial protection agency. If the banks are not duping the gullible then “ why are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers.” [...]
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 [...]
Federal Home Loan Bank sues Wall Street claiming Goldman, others failed to disclose liars’ loans mainly used by liars. Sure, liars’ loans were bank fraud and everybody involved should go to jail.
But the way the securitization process worked, it was the folks at the top of the food chain, in this case the Federal Home [...]
Bernanke goes all Obama; lays out plan to tighten-up. . . someday. Not saying he is wrong to keep rates low for now; just that making promises to reform someday is a very un-Fed-like, and very politician-like.
If we thought the Administration was serious about coordinating banking reform with Europe, then we’d be scared. Wait a [...]
Michael Shuman at Time states the obvious: China’s is growing faster than the U.S. not because its current political regime is so brilliant, but because the country is still rocketing out of Socialism.
Why it’s hell being a lib in America!
The liars behind “liars’ loans” turn on each other.
Great stat but misses the story: these are [...]
Not surprisingly our old friend Andy Kessler gets it exactly right. Forget smarter regulators or smarter banks; that’ll never happen. Raise capital requirements, limiting the banks ability to create money and fund poor investments. More people read Andy than read us, by a couple orders of magnitude, so now all we have to do is [...]
It seems like whenever the government or its apologists want to distract attention from government’s responsibility for the financial crisis they start talking about hedge funds. Thus Bloomberg’s headline today about Volcker’s testimony: “Volcker Says Hedge Funds Should be Allowed to Fail”
Well, when weren’t they? The only hedge fund that ever moved the U.S. government [...]
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 [...]