Undue corporate influence over U.S. elections has been a serious problem in American politics for decades, but this year's Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission made things worse. Worst of all, we may never know the extent of the damage.
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Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.C., is almost certain to be chairman of the Senate Banking Committee next year, once current chair Chris Dodd, D-Conn., is out of office. Johnson has never had a good reputation with consumer advocates, in large part because he’s opposed nearly every piece of legislation designed to thwart predatory lending. That perspective [...]
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Mike Stark has posted a provocative on-the-street interview with Barney Frank about the recently released Fed data. Frank offers what is now a standard defense of the Fed’s bailout operations: Without them, the economy would have collapsed, so critics should just quit whining. But Frank takes this line a step further, accusing liberal Fed critics [...]
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President Barack Obama and Congressional Republicans are ready to mortgage the American economy to billionaires in exchange for a few months of unemployment benefits. This deal is easily the gravest economic outrage of the Obama presidency to date, and signals that other political assaults on the economy are ahead. The basic deal: One year of [...]
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Kevin Drum gives a pretty thorough analysis of President Obama’s open assault on the mainstream Democratic Party at yesterday’s press conference, and declares that “programmatic liberalism is dead.” I think that’s more than a little exaggerated, but regardless, it’s not a fair description of the policies at stake in Obama’s lousy tax deal. The tax [...]
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The data from the Federal Reserve audit is full of frightening revelations about U.S. economic policy and those who implement it. When Wall Street went off the rails in the fall of 2008, policymakers told the public we had a certain kind of problem, knowing all along that the actual nature of the problem was [...]
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Just starting to parse through the Fed audit data. Looks like the Primary Dealer Credit Facility is predominantly a bailout for Citigroup and Bank of America. More to come . . . UPDATE: Looks like in the early days the Primary Dealer Credit Facility was almost exclusively used by Bear Stearns, Countrywide, Barclays and Cantor [...]
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I frequently disagree with Megan McArdle, but her WikiLeaks post yesterday on struck me as simply delusional. The basic argument: megabank financiers haven’t committed any crimes, because if they had, we’d already know about it. There’s a kind of efficient-market-hypothesis ring to this, and like the efficient-market-hypothesis, it has no basis in reality. As a [...]
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A rather nauseating statement from a Government Accountability Office report on foreclosures: Because they generally focus on the areas with greatest risk to the institutions they supervise, federal banking regulators had not generally examined servicers’ foreclosure practices, such as whether foreclosures are completed; however, given the ongoing mortgage crisis, they have recently placed greater emphasis [...]
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Yesterday, The New York Times ran an editorial opposing a new Federal Reserve proposal to eliminate predatory lending penalties. The rule under consideration is the same obscure regulation I blogged about a couple of weeks back, and it’s very encouraging to see major publications paying close attention to the technical workings of regulatory policy. Usually [...]
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