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26 Nov 09

How Big Is Too Big? « The Baseline Scenario

  • Representative Paul E. Kanjorski — the Pennsylvania Democrat who is chairman of the Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance and Government Sponsored Enterprises — proposed an amendment to the Financial Stability Improvement Act (currently before the House Financial Services Committee) that


    would empower federal regulators to rein in and dismantle financial firms that are so large, inter-connected, or risky that their collapse would put at risk the entire American economic system, even if those firms currently appear to be well-capitalized and healthy.


    In a major step forward, this passed the committee on Nov. 18.

  • The Kanjorski amendment recognizes that the systemic and societal danger posed by banks can be hard to recognize, and it proposes a number of potential objective criteria that could be used by the Financial Services Oversight Council (to be created by legislation in progress) to determine when banks need to be broken up, including the “scope, scale, exposure, leverage, interconnectedness of financial activities, as well as size of the financial company.”
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29 Jul 09

Reforming Credit | The American Prospect

  • As many as 10 million families will lose their home before this crisis is resolved. Tens of millions more are finding that their home equity, the fruit of many years of faithful monthly mortgage payments, has shriveled up because of declining housing values.
28 Jul 09

U.S. Issues New Rules on Short-Selling - WSJ.com

  • The SEC's new rules are a middle ground. They finalize temporary rules requiring traders to complete a short sale within four days. They create more disclosure, but still delay the information by a month. They also aggregate short-position data for individual stocks but keep individual money manager positions confidential.
  • The SEC, however, is backing away from its earlier move to require hedge funds and other money managers to disclose weekly their short positions once they reach a certain concentration.
18 Jul 09

The six deadly hypocrites - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

  • Case in point: the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, which denied Medicare the right to bargain for lower drug prices, locked in overpayments to private insurance companies, and did nothing, nothing at all, to pay for its proposed outlays. How many of these six self-proclaimed defenders of solvency voted no on the crucial procedural vote? One. (Joe Lieberman, to my surprise.)
02 Jul 09

FT.com / Markets - Insight: SEC gets tough on Wall St tribalism

  • Unsurprisingly, Wall Street banks are now trying to exploit these tribal divisions to the full. In recent weeks some have been lobbying for the Federal Reserve or the CFTC to take responsibility for derivatives, since they think that the CFTC would adopt a lighter- touch approach than the SEC (which, is ironic, since a decade ago the banking industry was furiously lobbying to keep the CFTC away from derivatives).
22 May 09

Editorial - Military-Industrial Redux - NYTimes.com

  • The Pentagon has been rightly shamed by reports that 96 major new weapons programs are running almost $300 billion over estimates and averaging 22 months behind delivery. As Congress took aim this week at this sorry performance, defense officials rushed to announce that they would be hiring 20,000 new managers and engineers during the next five years to ride herd over weapons development.

  • A measure heading to the White House for President Obama’s signature would create a new position at the Pentagon to track the biggest contracts, worth about 20 percent of the procurement budget. The evaluator — who would be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate — would have two new deputies, one tasked with tracking cost and the other performance.


    The goal is to replace layers of unaccountable bureaucracy and create an early warning system to identify offenders; apply tighter management to the most vital contracts; and provide lawmakers, the secretary of defense and the president with the information they need to decide whether to terminate projects. The measure also soundly prods the Pentagon to thoroughly test prototypes before making any heavy investment.

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