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 [...]
Gabcast! Richard Vigilante on Up Front Tuesday with Vicki McKenna.Â
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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 [...]
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 was a disappointing but not surprising piece in the NYT today from the man we still regard as the greatest Fed Chairman in history. Paul Volcker’s long and rambling commentary re-states one inoffensive but irrelevant reform proposal and another that would perpetuate the worst in the current system.
The small but irrelevant proposal is to [...]
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 [...]
Here’s the President’s problem. It’s not just that he is far to the left of the average American. It’s that for all his high-mindedness he is operating in a different ethical scheme than most Americans—and he does not seem to know it.
What the President really seems to regard as the defense of high principle Americans [...]
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Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante Call for Clarity, Full Disclosure and Raised Capital Requirements
Wall Street Journal today reports, “President Barack Obama on Thursday is expected to propose new limits on the size and risk taken by the country’s biggest banks, marking the administration’s latest assault on Wall Street in what could mark a return, [...]