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Manifesto

June 13th, 2012 Posted in Uncategorized
Jun, 13 2012
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For the past few years, a central mission of this blog has been to focus on Washington’s unending efforts to protect, pamper and bail out the Wall Street megabanks at taxpayer expense.  From Maiden Lane III to TARP and through countless “backdoor bailouts”, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department have been pumping money into businesses which should have gone bankrupt in 2008.  Worse yet, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Hold-harmless have expressed no interest in bringing charges against those miscreants responsible for causing the financial crisis.  The Federal Reserve’s latest update to its Survey of Consumer Finances for 2010 revealed that during the period of 2007-2010, the median family net worth declined by a whopping thirty-eight percent.  Despite the massive extent of wealth destruction caused by the financial crisis, our government is doing nothing about it.

I have always been a fan of economist John Hussman of the Hussman Funds, whose Weekly Market Comment essays are frequently referenced on this website.  Professor Hussman’s most recent piece, “The Heart of the Matter” serves as a manifesto of how the financial crisis was caused, why nothing was done about it and why it is happening again both in the United States and in Europe.  Beyond that, Professor Hussman offers some suggestions for remedying this unaddressed and unresolved set of circumstances.  It is difficult to single out a passage to quote because every word of Hussman’s latest Market Comment is precious.  Be sure to read it.  What I present here are some hints as to the significance of this important essay:

The ongoing debate about the economy continues along largely partisan lines, with conservatives arguing that taxes just aren’t low enough, and the economy should be freed of regulations, while liberals argue that the economy needs larger government programs and grand stimulus initiatives.

Lost in this debate is any recognition of the problem that lies at the heart of the matter:  a warped financial system, both in the U.S. and globally, that directs scarce capital to speculative and unproductive uses, and refuses to restructure debt once that debt has gone bad.

Specifically, over the past 15 years, the global financial system – encouraged by misguided policy and short-sighted monetary interventions – has lost its function of directing scarce capital toward projects that enhance the world’s standard of living. Instead, the financial system has been transformed into a self-serving, grotesque casino that misallocates scarce savings, begs for and encourages speculative bubbles, refuses to restructure bad debt, and demands that the most reckless stewards of capital should be rewarded through bailouts that transfer bad debt from private balance sheets to the public balance sheet.

*   *   *

By our analysis, the U.S. economy is presently entering a recession.  Not next year; not later this year; but now.  We expect this to become increasingly evident in the coming months, but through a constant process of denial in which every deterioration is dismissed as transitory, and every positive outlier is celebrated as a resumption of growth.  To a large extent, this downturn is a “boomerang” from the credit crisis we experienced several years ago.  The chain of events is as follows:

Financial deregulation and monetary negligence -> Housing bubble -> Credit crisis marked by failure to restructure bad debt -> Global recession -> Government deficits in U.S. and globally -> Conflict between single currency and disparate fiscal policies in Europe -> Austerity -> European recession and credit strains -> Global recession.

In effect, we’re going into another recession because we never effectively addressed the problems that produced the first one, leaving us unusually vulnerable to aftershocks.  Our economic malaise is the result of a whole chain of bad decisions that have distorted the financial markets in ways that make recurring crisis inevitable.

*   *   *

Every major bank is funded partially by depositors, but those deposits typically represent only about 60% of the funding.  The rest is debt to the bank’s own bondholders, and equity of its stockholders.  When a country like Spain goes in to save a failing bank like Bankia – and does so by buying stock in the bank – the government is putting its citizens in a “first loss” position that protects the bondholders at public expense.  This has been called “nationalization” because Spain now owns most of the stock, but the rescue has no element of restructuring at all.  All of the bank’s liabilities – even to its own bondholders – are protected at public expense.  So in order to defend bank bondholders, Spain is increasing the public debt burden of its own citizens.  This approach is madness, because Spain’s citizens will ultimately suffer the consequences by eventual budget austerity or risk of government debt default.

The way to restructure a bank is to take it into receivership, write down the bad assets, wipe out the stockholders and much of the subordinated debt, and then recapitalize the remaining entity by selling it back into the private market.  Depositors don’t lose a dime.  While the U.S. appropriately restructured General Motors – wiping out stock, renegotiating contracts, and subjecting bondholders to haircuts – the banking system was largely untouched.

*   *   *

If it seems as if the global economy has learned nothing, it is because evidently the global economy has learned nothing.  The right thing to do, again, is to take receivership of insolvent banks and wipe out the stock and subordinated debt, using the borrowed funds to protect depositors in the event that the losses run deep enough to eat through the intervening layers of liabilities (which is doubtful), and otherwise using the borrowed funds to stimulate the economy after the restructuring occurs.  We’re going to keep having crises until global leaders recognize that short of creating hyperinflation (which also subordinates the public, in this case by destroying the value of currency), there is no substitute for debt restructuring.

For some insight as to why the American megabanks were never taken into temporary receivership, it is useful to look back to February of 2010 when Michael Shedlock (a/k/a“Mish”) provided us with a handy summary of the 224-page Quarterly Report from SIGTARP (the Special Investigator General for TARP — Neil Barofsky).  My favorite comment from Mish appeared near the conclusion of his summary:

Clearly TARP was a complete failure, that is assuming the goals of TARP were as stated.

My belief is the benefits of TARP and the entire alphabet soup of lending facilities was not as stated by Bernanke and Geithner, but rather to shift as much responsibility as quickly as possible on to the backs of taxpayers while trumping up nonsensical benefits of doing so.  This was done to bail out the banks at any and all cost to the taxpayers.

Was this a huge conspiracy by the Fed and Treasury to benefit the banks at taxpayer expense?  Of course it was, and the conspiracy is unraveling as documented in this report and as documented in AIG Coverup Conspiracy Unravels.

On January 29 2010, David Reilly wrote an article for Bloomberg BusinessWeek concerning the previous week’s hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.  After quoting from Reilly’s article, Mish made this observation:

Most know I am not a big believer in conspiracies.  I regularly dismiss them.  However, this one was clear from the beginning and like all massive conspiracies, it is now in the light of day.

David Reilly began the Bloomberg Business Week piece this way:

The idea of secret banking cabals that control the country and global economy are a given among conspiracy theorists who stockpile ammo, bottled water and peanut butter.  After this week’s congressional hearing into the bailout of American International Group Inc., you have to wonder if those folks are crazy after all.

Wednesday’s hearing described a secretive group deploying billions of dollars to favored banks, operating with little oversight by the public or elected officials.

That “secretive group” is The Federal Reserve of New York, whose president at the time of the AIG bailout was “Turbo” Tim Geithner.  David Reilly’s disgust at the hearing’s revelations became apparent from the tone of his article:

By pursuing this line of inquiry, the hearing revealed some of the inner workings of the New York Fed and the outsized role it plays in banking.  This insight is especially valuable given that the New York Fed is a quasi-governmental institution that isn’t subject to citizen intrusions such as freedom of information requests, unlike the Federal Reserve.

At least in the Eurozone there is fear that the taxpayers will never submit to enhanced economic austerity measures, which would force the citizenry into an impoverished existence so that their increased tax burden could pay off the debts incurred by irresponsible bankers.  In the United States there is no such concern.  The public is much more compliant.  Whether that will change is anyone’s guess.


 

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Here We Go Again

September 5th, 2011 Posted in Uncategorized
Sep, 05 2011
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Goldman Sachs is back in the spotlight.  This time, there is a chorus of disgust being expressed about how Goldman conducts its business.  Back in June of 2009, Matt Taibbi famously characterized Goldman Sachs in the following terms:

The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

The latest episode of predation by the Vampire Squid concerns an August 16 report prepared by Alan Brazil, a member of Goldman’s trading team.  Brazil prepared the 54-page presentation for the firm’s institutional clients as a guide to the impending economic collapse with some trading strategies to benefit from that event.  Page 3 of the report starts with the headline:  “Here We Go Again”.  The statement was prescient in that the report itself initiated a renewed, consensual effort to condemn Goldman.  Page 4 has the headline:   “The Underlying Problem May Be Structural And Created By the Housing Bubble”.  The extent to which the underlying problem may have been caused by Goldman Sachs had been previously discussed by Matt Taibbi, who explained Goldman’s propensity to act the way it always has:  

If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain  .  .  .

Shah Gilani of Forbes reacted to the publication of Alan Brazil’s report with the following statement, which was used for the title of his own article:

In my opinion, Goldman isn’t just a travesty of a mockery of a sham, it is a criminal enterprise and worthy of being stepped on itself.

Susan Pulliam and Liz Rappaport broke the story on Goldman’s “Dark View” for The Wall Street Journal:

The report, released by the Hedge Fund Strategies group in Goldman’s securities division, provides a glimpse into the trading ideas that are generated for hedge funds through strategists, such as Mr. Brazil, who are part of Goldman’s trading operation rather than its research group.

Such strategists sit alongside the traders who are executing trades for their clients.  Unlike analysts in firms’ research divisions—who are supposed to be walled off from information about the activity of the firm’s clients—these desk strategists have a front-row seat for viewing the ebb and flow of clients’ investment plays.

They can see if there is a groundswell of interest among hedge funds in taking bearish bets in a certain sector, and they watch trading volumes dry up or explode.  Their point of view is informed by more, and often confidential, information about clients than analysts’ opinions, making their research and ideas highly prized by traders.

The report itself makes note that the information included isn’t considered research by Goldman.  “This material is not independent advice and is not a product of Global Investment Research,” the report notes.

The idea that such a gloomy assessment had not been shared with the general public has become a frequently-expressed complaint.  Michael T. Snyder wrote a piece for Seeking Alpha, which provided this explanation for the lack of candor:

As I wrote about the other day, the financial world is about to hit the panic button.  Things could start falling apart at any time. Most of these big banks will not publicly admit how bad things are, but privately there is a whole lot of freaking out going on.

*   *   *

You aren’t going to hear the truth from the media or from our politicians, because keeping people calm is much more of a priority to them than is telling the truth.

Henry Blodget of The Business Insider dissuaded the “little people” from getting any grandiose ideas after reading Brazil’s briefing:

Unfortunately, lest you think your knowledge of this semi-secret report will finally allow you to out-trade hedge funds, it won’t. The hedge funds got the report on August 16th.  As usual, you’re the last to know.

Beyond that, there is Goldman’s longstanding reputation for “front running” its own clients, which must have inspired this remark in a critique of Alan Brazil’s report, appearing at the Minyanville website:

Coincidentally, he had some surefire trading strategies for clients interested in capitalizing on this trend.  Presumably, Goldman’s own traders began bidding the various recommended hedges up some time earlier, a possibility Goldman discloses up front.

So this is what the squid is down to these days:  peddling the obvious to the bottom-feeders below it in the financial food chain.

By now, those commentators who had criticized Matt Taibbi for his tour de force against Goldman (such as Megan McArdle) must be experiencing a bit of remorse.  Meanwhile, those of us who wrote items appearing at GoldmanSachs666.com are exercising our bragging rights.


 

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A Preemptive Strike By Tools Of The Plutocracy

December 16th, 2010 Posted in Uncategorized
Dec, 16 2010
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The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) was created by section 5 of the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act (or FERA) which was signed into law on May 20, 2009.   The ten-member Commission has been modeled after the Pecora Commission of the early 1930s, which investigated the causes of the Great Depression, and ultimately provided a basis for reforms of Wall Street and the banking industry.  As I pointed out on April 15, more than a few commentators had been expressing their disappointment with the FCIC.  Section (5)(h)(1) of  the FERA established a deadline for the FCIC to submit its report:

On December 15, 2010, the Commission shall submit to the President and to the Congress a report containing the findings and conclusions of the Commission on the causes of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States.

In light of the fact that it took the FCIC eight months to conduct its first hearing, one shouldn’t be too surprised to learn that their report had not been completed by December 15.  The FCIC expects to have the report finalized in approximately one month.  This article by Phil Mattingly and Robert Schmidt of Bloomberg News provides a good history of the partisan struggle within the FCIC.  On December 14, Sewell Chan of The New York Times disclosed that the four Republican members of the FCIC would issue their own report on December 15:

The Republican members of the panel were angered last week when the commission voted 6 to 4, along partisan lines, to limit individual comments by the commissioners to 9 pages each in a 500-page report that the commission plans to publish next month with Public Affairs, an imprint of the Perseus Books Group, one Republican commissioner said.

Beyond that, Shahien Nasiripour of the Huffington Post revealed more details concerning the dissent voiced by Republican panel members:

During a private commission meeting last week, all four Republicans voted in favor of banning the phrases “Wall Street” and “shadow banking” and the words “interconnection” and “deregulation” from the panel’s final report, according to a person familiar with the matter and confirmed by Brooksley E. Born, one of the six commissioners who voted against the proposal.

I gave those four Republican members more credit than that.  I was wrong.  Commission Vice-Chairman Bill Thomas, along with Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Peter Wallison, and Keith Hennessey issued their own propaganda piece as a preemptive strike against whatever less-than-complimentary things the FCIC might ultimately say about the Wall Street Plutocrats.  The spin strategy employed by these men in explaining the cause of the financial crisis is to blame Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the entire episode.  (That specious claim has been debunked by Mark Thoma and others many times.)  This remark from the “Introduction” section of the Republicans’ piece set the tone:

While the housing bubble, the financial crisis, and the recession are surely interrelated events, we do not believe that the housing bubble was a sufficient condition for the financial crisis. The unprecedented number of subprime and other weak mortgages in this bubble set it and its effect apart from others in the past.

Many economists and other commentators will have plenty of fun ripping this thing to shreds.  One of the biggest lies that jumped right out at me was this statement from page 5 of the so-called Financial Crisis Primer:

Put simply, the risk of a housing collapse was simply not appreciated.  Not by homeowners, not by investors, not by banks, not by rating agencies, and not by regulators.

That lie can and will be easily refuted —  many times over —  by the simple fact that a large number of essays had been published by economists, commentators and even dilettantes who predicted the housing collapse.

Yves Smith provided a refreshing retort to the Plutocracy’s Primer at her Naked Capitalism website:

This whole line of thinking is garbage, the financial policy equivalent of arguing that the sun revolves around the earth.  Yes, the US and other countries provide overly generous subsidies to housing, and curtailing them over time would not be a bad idea.  But that’s been our policy for decades.  Calling that a major, let alone primary, cause of the crisis, is simply a highly coded “blame the poor” strategy.  In reality, both the run-up to the crisis and its aftermath were one of the greatest wealth transfers from the citizenry at large to a comparatively small group of rentiers in the history of man.

*   *   *

This pathetic development shows how deeply this country is in thrall to lobbyists.  But these so-called commissioners, who are really no more than financial services minions out to misbrand themselves as independent, look to have overplayed their hand.  This stunt shows more than a tad of desperation on the part of banks and their operatives in their excessive efforts block any remotely accurate, and therefore critical, report on the industry.

Perversely, this development may be a positive indicator on several fronts.  First, the FCIC report may be tougher and more probing than I dared hope.

The fact that a pre-emptive strike by the Plutocratic “Gang of Four” has been initiated with the release of their Primer could indeed suggest that that their patrons are worried about the ultimate conclusions to be published by the FCIC next month.  The release of this Primer will surely draw plenty of criticism and attract more attention to the FCIC’s final report.  Nevertheless, will the resulting firestorm motivate the public to finally demand some serious action beyond the lame “financial reform” fiasco?  Adam Garfinkle’s recent essay in The American Interest suggests that such hope could be misplaced:

Obsessed with vacuous celebrity, Americans make it easier than ever for plutocrats to sail under the radar.  Corporate heavyweights and bankers may be suborning Congress and ripping off  “we the people” left and right, but we’re too busy dancing with the stars to notice.

Will this situation ever change?



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Still Wrong After All These Years

June 21st, 2010 Posted in Uncategorized
Jun, 21 2010
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June 21, 2010

I’m quite surprised by the fact that people continue to pay serious attention to the musings of Alan Greenspan.  On June 18, The Wall Street Journal saw fit to publish an opinion piece by the man referred to as “The Maestro” (although – these days – that expression is commonly used in sarcasm).  The former Fed chairman expounded that recent attempts to rein in the federal budget are coming “none too soon”.  Near the end of the article, Greenspan made the statement that will earn him a nomination for TheCenterLane.com’s Jackass of the Year Award:

I believe the fears of budget contraction inducing a renewed decline of economic activity are misplaced.

John Mauldin recently provided us with a thorough explanation of why Greenspan’s statement is wrong:

There are loud calls in the US and elsewhere for more fiscal constraints.  I am part of that call.  Fiscal deficits of 10% of GDP is a prescription for disaster.  As we have discussed in previous letters, the book by Rogoff and Reinhart (This Time is Different) clearly shows that at some point, bond investors start to ask for higher rates and then the interest rate becomes a spiral.  Think of Greece.  So, not dealing with the deficit is simply creating a future crisis even worse than the one we just had.

But cutting the deficit too fast could also throw the country back in a recession.  There has to be a balance.

*   *   *

That deficit reduction will also reduce GDP.  That means you collect less taxes which makes the deficits worse which means you have to make more cuts than planned which means lower tax receipts which means etc.  Ireland is working hard to reduce its deficits but their GDP has dropped by almost 20%! Latvia and Estonia have seen their nominal GDP drop by almost 30%!  That can only be characterized as a depression for them.

Robert Reich’s refutation of Greenspan’s article was right on target:

Contrary to Greenspan, today’s debt is not being driven by new spending initiatives.  It’s being driven by policies that Greenspan himself bears major responsibility for.

Greenspan supported George W. Bush’s gigantic tax cut in 2001 (that went mostly to the rich), and uttered no warnings about W’s subsequent spending frenzy on the military and a Medicare drug benefit (corporate welfare for Big Pharma) — all of which contributed massively to today’s debt.  Greenspan also lowered short-term interest rates to zero in 2002 but refused to monitor what Wall Street was doing with all this free money.  Years before that, he urged Congress to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act and he opposed oversight of derivative trading.  All this contributed to Wall Street’s implosion in 2008 that led to massive bailout, and a huge contraction of the economy that required the stimulus package.  These account for most of the rest of today’s debt.

If there’s a single American more responsible for today’s “federal debt explosion” than Alan Greenspan, I don’t know him.

But we can manage the Greenspan Debt if we get the U.S. economy growing again.  The only way to do that when consumers can’t and won’t spend and when corporations won’t invest is for the federal government to pick up the slack.

This brings us back to my initial question of why anyone would still take Alan Greenspan seriously.  As far back as April of 2008 – five months before the financial crisis hit the “meltdown” stage — Bernd Debusmann had this to say about The Maestro for Reuters, in a piece entitled, “Alan Greenspan, dented American idol”:

Instead of the fawning praise heaped on Greenspan when the economy was booming, there are now websites portraying him in dark colors.  One site is called The Mess That Greenspan Made, another Greenspan’s Body Count.  Greenspan’s memoirs, The Age of Turbulence, prompted hedge fund manager William Fleckenstein to write a book entitled Greenspan’s Bubbles, the Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve.  It’s in its fourth printing.

The day after Greenspan’s essay appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Howard Gold provided us with this recap of Greenspan’s Fed chairmanship in an article for MarketWatch:

The Fed chairman’s hands-off stance helped the housing bubble morph into a full-blown financial crisis when hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and other unregulated derivatives — backed by subprime mortgages and other dubious instruments — went up in smoke.

Highly leveraged banks that bet on those vehicles soon were insolvent, too, and the Fed, the U.S. Treasury and, of course, taxpayers had to foot the bill.  We’re still paying.

But this was not just a case of unregulated markets run amok.  Government policies clearly made things much worse — and here, too, Greenspan was the culprit.

The Fed’s manipulation of interest rates in the middle of the last decade laid the groundwork for the most fevered stage of the housing bubble.  To this day, Greenspan, using heavy-duty statistical analysis, disputes the role his super-low federal funds rate played in encouraging risky behavior in housing and capital markets.

Among the harsh critiques of Greenspan’s career at the Fed, was Frederick Sheehan’s book, Panderer to Power.  Ryan McMaken’s review of the book recently appeared at the LewRockwell.com website – with the title, “The Real Legacy of Alan Greenspan”.   Here is some of what McMacken had to say:

.  .  .  Panderer to Power is the story of an economist whose primary skill was self-promotion, and who in the end became increasingly divorced from economic reality.  Even as early as April 2008 (before the bust was obvious to all), the L.A. Times, observing Greenspan’s post-retirement speaking tour, noted that “the unseemly, globe-trotting, money-grabbing, legacy-spinning, responsibility-denying tour of Alan Greenspan continues, as relentless as a bad toothache.”

*   *   *

Although Greenspan had always had a terrible record on perceiving trends in the economy, Sheehan’s story shows a Greenspan who becomes increasingly out to lunch with each passing year as he spun more and more outlandish theories about hidden profits and productivity in the economy that no one else could see.  He spoke incessantly on topics like oil and technology while the bubbles grew larger and larger.  And finally, in the end, he retired to the lecture circuit where he was forced to defend his tarnished record.

The ugly truth is that America has been in a bear market economy since 2000 (when “The Maestro” was still Fed chair).  In stark contrast to what you’ve been hearing from the people on TV, the folks at Comstock Partners put together a list of ten compelling reasons why “the stock market is in a secular (long-term) downtrend that began in early 2000 and still has some time to go.”  This essay is a “must read”.  Further undermining Greenspan’s recent opinion piece was the conclusion reached in the Comstock article:

The data cited here cover the major indicators of economic activity, and they paint a picture of an economy that has moved up, but only from extremely depressed numbers to a point where they are less depressed.  And keep in mind that this is the result of the most massive monetary and fiscal stimulus ever applied to a major economy.  In our view the ability of the economy to undergo a sustained recovery without continued massive help is still questionable.

As always, Alan Greenspan is still wrong.  Unfortunately, there are still too many people taking him seriously.




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A Look Ahead

December 7th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized
Dec, 07 2009
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December 7, 2009

As 2010 approaches, expect the usual bombardment of prognostications from the stars of the info-tainment industry, concerning everything from celebrity divorces to the nuclear ambitions of Iran.   Meanwhile, those of us preferring quality news reporting must increasingly rely on internet-based venues to seek out the views of more trustworthy sources on the many serious subjects confronting the world.  On October 29, I discussed the most recent GMO Quarterly Newsletter from financial wizard Jeremy Grantham and his expectation that the stock market will undergo a

“correction” or drop of approximately 20 percent next year.   Grantham’s paper inspired others to ponder the future of the troubled American economy and the overheated stock market.  Mark Hulbert, editor of The Hulbert Financial Digest, wrote a piece for the December 5 edition of The New York Times, picking up on Jeremy Grantham’s stock performance expectations.  Hulbert noted Grantham’s continuing emphasis on “high-quality, blue chip” stocks as the most likely to perform well in the coming year.  Grantham’s rationale is based on the fact that the recent stock market rally was excessively biased in favor of junk stocks, rather than the higher-quality “blue chips”, such as Wal-Mart.  Hulbert noted how Wal-mart shares gained only 14 percent since March 9, while the shares of the debt-laden electronics services firm, Sanmina-SCI, have risen more than 600 percent during that same period.  Hulbert pointed out that the conclusion to be reached from this information should be pretty obvious:

As an unintended consequence, Mr. Grantham said, high-quality stocks today are about as cheap as they have ever been relative to shares of firms with weaker finances.

It’s almost a certain bet that high-quality blue chips will outperform lower-quality stocks over the longer term,” he said.

My favorite reaction to Jeremy Grantham’s newsletter came from Paul Farrell of MarketWatch, who emphasized Grantham’s broader view for the economy as a whole, rather than taking a limited focus on stock performance.  Farrell targeted President Obama’s “predictably irrational” economic policies by presenting us with a handy outline of Grantham’s criticism of those policies.  Farrell prefaced his outline with this statement:

So please listen closely to his 14-point analysis of the rampant irrationality at the highest level of American government today, because what he is also predicting is another catastrophic meltdown dead ahead.

At the first point in the outline, Farrell made this observation:

If Grantham ever was a fan, he’s clearly disillusioned with the president.   His 14 points expose the extremely irrational behavior of Obama breaking promises by turning Washington over to Wall Street, a blunder that will trigger the Great Depression 2.

Farrell’s discussion included a reference to the latest article by Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone, entitled “Obama’s Big Sellout”.  The Rolling Stone website described Taibbi’s latest essay in these terms:

In “Obama’s Big Sellout”, Matt Taibbi argues that President Obama has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway.  Rather than keeping his progressive campaign advisers on board, Taibbi says Obama gave key economic positions in the White House to the very people who caused the economic crisis in the first place.  Taibbi also points to the ties Obama’s appointees have to one main in particular:  Bob Rubin, the former Goldman Sachs co-chairman who served as Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton.

Since the article is not available online yet, you will have to purchase the latest issue of Rolling Stone or wait patiently for the release of their next issue, at which time “Obama’s Big Sellout” should be online.  In the mean time, they have provided this brief video of Matt Taibbi’s discussion of the piece.

The new year will also bring us a new book by Danny Schecter, entitled The Crime of Our Time.  Mr. Schecter recently discussed this book in a live interview with Max Keiser.  (The interview begins at 16:55 into the video.)  In discussing the book, Schecter explained how “the financial industry essentially de-regulated its own marketplace.  They got rid of the laws that required disclosure and accountability …” and created a “shadow banking system”.  Shechter’s previous book, Plunder, has now become a film that will be released soon.  In Plunder, he described how the subprime mortgage crisis nearly destroyed the American economy.  The interview by Max Keiser contains a short clip from the upcoming film.  Danny also directed the movie based on (and named after) his 2006 book, In Debt We Trust, wherein he predicted the bursting of the credit bubble.

It was right at this point last year when Danny’s father died.  The event is easy for me to remember because my own father died one week later.  At that time, I was comforted by reading Danny’s eloquent piece about his father’s death.  Danny was kind enough to respond to the e-mail I had sent him since, as an old fan from his days at WBCN radio in Boston, during the early 1970s, my friends and I tried our best to provide Danny with any leads we came across.  These days, it’s good to see that Danny Schechter “The News Dissector” is still at it with the same vigor he demonstrated more than thirty-five years ago.  I look forward to his new book and the new film.



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The Legacy Of Mark Pittman

December 3rd, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized
Dec, 03 2009
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December 3, 2009

Just a week before the Senate banking committee was to begin confirmation hearings on President Obama’s nomination of Ben Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve, one of the most important watchdogs of the Fed died at the age of 52.  Mark Pittman was the reporter at Bloomberg News whose work was responsible for the lawsuit, brought under the Freedom of Information Act, against the Federal Reserve, seeking disclosure of the identities of those financial firms benefiting from the Fed’s eleven emergency lending programs.  The suit, Bloomberg LP v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 08-CV-9595, (U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York) resulted in a ruling last August by Judge Loretta Preska, who rejected the Fed’s defense that disclosure would adversely affect the ability of those institutions to compete for business.  The suit also sought disclosure of the amounts loaned to those institutions as well as the assets put up as collateral under the Fed’s eleven lending programs, created in response to the financial crisis.  The Federal Reserve is pursuing an appeal of that decision.

Since September of 2008, we have been overexposed to the specious claims by politicians, regulators and other federal officials, that the financial crisis was “unforeseeable”.  The veracity of such statements is undercut by the fact that on June 29 of 2007, Mark Pittman provided us with this ominous warning from his desk at Bloomberg News:

The subprime meltdown is sending shock waves through the capital markets in part because mortgage bonds are the world’s biggest debt market, according to the Securities Industry Financial Markets Association.

Pittman’s groundbreaking work on the havoc created by the subprime mortgage-backed securities market resulted in his receiving the Gerald Loeb Award in 2008, which he shared with his fellow Bloomberg reporters, Bob Ivry and Kathleen Howley, for a five-part series entitled “Wall Street’s Faustian Bargain”.

On November 30, Bob Ivry wrote what many have described as the “definitive obituary” for Mark Pittman.  Ivry disclosed that although the actual cause of death was not yet known, Pittman had suffered from “heart-related illnesses”.  In addition to providing us with his colleague’s impressive biography, Ivry shared the reactions to Pittman’s death, expressed by several prominent individuals:

“He was one of the great financial journalists of our time,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University in New York and the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for economics. “His death is shocking.”

*   *   *

“Who sues the Fed?  One reporter on the planet,” said Emma Moody, a Wall Street Journal editor who worked with Pittman at Bloomberg News.  “The more complex the issue, the more he wanted to dig into it.  Years ago, he forced us to learn what a credit- default swap was.  He dragged us kicking and screaming.”

*   *   *

“He’s been on this crisis since before the crisis,” said Gretchen Morgenson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning financial columnist for the NewYork Times.  “He was the best at burrowing into the most complex securities Wall Street could come up with and explaining the implications of them to readers of all levels of sophistication.  His investigative work during the crisis set the standard for other reporters everywhere.  He was a giant.”

Congressman Brad Miller of North Carolina wrote an informative remembrance of Pittman for The Huffington Post.  This statement is one of the highlights from that piece:

The financial crisis is a result of a failure of every institution of our democracy.  Regulators failed.  Congress failed.  And the financial press failed abysmally.  Mark was an exception.  Mark’s irreverence allowed him to see the crisis coming when other financial reporters accepted uncritically what the industry said.  Mark’s irreverence was what made him a great reporter.

Mark Pittman was featured in the recent film American Casino, a documentary which analyzed the subprime mortgage catastrophe and the resulting financial crisis.  In September of 2008, when the crisis had most people in the world scratching their heads in confusion, Pittman provided a roadmap to the initial bailouts, shortly after they were distributed.

The interview with Mark Pittman, conducted by Ryan Chittum for the Columbia Journalism Review in February of 2009, gave Pittman the opportunity to share his experiences during the onset of the financial crisis.  The interview is especially informative as to what we can expect to find out about this mess in the future, as the investigations begin to unfold.  Passages like these reveal the magnitude of the loss resulting from Pittman’s death:

TA:  Does there need to be regulation just to simplify things to where it makes sense to more people?

MP:  If it was all transparent the complexity wouldn’t matter.  If the CDO market had had publicly available prospectuses with the contents of the CDO disclosed, we wouldn’t have this issue, because Bloomberg probably would have made fun of anybody who bought anything like this.  But there was this enormous shadow banking system going on.  We did a series about that, too.  A lot of times people don’t see what we do.

*   *   *

The thing that people don’t realize is that the Fed is now the “bad bank.”  That’s just something that people don’t understand.  They’ve taken collateral, and they refuse to tell us how they valued it  …

We have numerous banks — dozens, maybe hundreds that are insolvent.  And they become more insolvent every day because more people quit paying their mortgage loans, and more guys move out of the shopping center, and more people quit paying their credit cards.  But nobody wants to have the adult conversation.  We need to be honest about what the problem is here, how big it is, and how we’re going forward to clean it up, and who’s going to pay for it.

*   *   *

Hopefully, we will be able to inform the people enough to know how badly we’re getting screwed (laughs).  We need to know how to prevent it from happening again, and we need to know who did it.  There’s renewed energy on this front because we’ve staffed up the people who cover banks, the securities firms.  We have a lot more people going at real estate and a bunch of different areas that this involves.  That was a conscious move from meetings we started having in 2007.  We hired people and we moved people from one area to another area.

Pittman’s final statement during the interview underscores the fact that one of the greatest fighters for an informed public has been lost:

This is a big deal and it’s going to be going on — I swear to God I’m going to retire on this story, because it’s just going to keep happening.

Tragically, Mark Pittman was forced to “retire” on terms that were not satisfactory to any of us.  We can only hope that others will be inspired by his work and follow his lead.



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The Pushback Against Bernanke

November 30th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized
Nov, 30 2009
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November 30, 2009

This week brings us the confirmation hearings on President Obama’s nomination of Ben Bernanke to a second four-year term as chairman of the Federal Reserve.  The recent progress in Congressional efforts to audit the Federal Reserve will certainly spice up the confirmation hearings.  If that weren’t enough, Bernanke saw fit to write a commentary piece for Sunday’s edition of The Washington Post, expressing his opposition to any attempts to limit the Fed’s power and subject it to an audit.  Here is some of what he had to say in that column:

These measures are very much out of step with the global consensus on the appropriate role of central banks, and they would seriously impair the prospects for economic and financial stability in the United States.  The Fed played a major part in arresting the crisis, and we should be seeking to preserve, not degrade, the institution’s ability to foster financial stability and to promote economic recovery without inflation.

Well, he should have known what would be coming next  . . .  the avalanche of criticism pointing out how the Fed played a major role in causing the crisis.  As you will see below, that response was swift.  Worse yet, Bernanke’s theme of “we learned our lesson” will surely inspire harsh interrogation at the confirmation hearings:

The Federal Reserve, like other regulators around the world, did not do all that it could have to constrain excessive risk-taking in the financial sector in the period leading up to the crisis.  We have extensively reviewed our performance and moved aggressively to fix the problems.

Dean Baker did not waste any time before ripping into Bernanke’s essay.  Baker’s Beat the Press blog at The American Prospect website regularly upbraids Bernanke for his responsibility in causing the economic crisis.  Baker’s retort to the Washington Post piece was published at the Talking Points Memo website.  The final paragraph of Baker’s essay reflected his outrage that the Post would publish Bernanke’s rant without an opposing response:

The arrogance of this column is almost beyond belief.  This man is incredibly lucky to still have his job at time when millions of other workers have lost theirs as a direct result of his incompetence.  A serious news outlet would not have printed such a ridiculously self-serving piece without at least securing an opposing opinion.  Of course, Bernanke’s piece appeared in the Washington Post.

Dean Baker’s primary criticism of Bernanke is based on the Fed chair’s failure to control the 8-trillion-dollar housing bubble before it burst, nearly destroying the entire economy:

We had further losses in demand associated with the bursting of a bubble in non-residential real estate.  In total, the loss in bubble-driven demand was well over $1 trillion a year.  All of it an entirely predictable outcome of the collapse of a housing bubble.

The simple reality is that there is nothing in the Fed’s bag of tricks that will allow it to easily replace over $1 trillion in annual demand.  In short, the bubble guaranteed the economic disaster that we are now experiencing, end of story.

At the Naked Capitalism website, Yves Smith dealt a hefty load of thorough criticism on the Bernanke article.  She began with the verdict against Bernanke and built an impressive argument supporting her opinion:

What is interesting is how much the tables have turned.  The Obama effort to make the Fed into the uber bank regulator has become a rout, with decent odds that the Fed will have its powers reduced, and an increasing possibility that Bernanke might not be reconfirmed (which is frankly the right outcome, no CEO who presided over a similar disaster would still be in charge).

Smith did not restrict her criticism to the Fed’s failure to control the housing bubble.  Here are some of her points:

For instance, the Fed was the architect of the “let a thousand flowers bloom” policy towards derivatives, and made inadequate (one might say no) effort to understand new financial technology.  Bernanke himself rationalized burgeoning consumer debt, claiming that consumer balance sheets were in good shape.  Hun?  This is Japan circa 1989 thinking.

*   *   *

Yes, I am told the Fed is now making all the banks disclose their derivatives positions to them, but the Fed lacks the analytical capacity to do much with this information (and I am further told the Fed staff understands that too).  So that does not fit my notion of “tougher oversight.”  And the rest is just empty promises.

In response to Bernanke’s claim that Congressional efforts to rein-in the authority of the Fed are “very much out of step with the global consensus on the appropriate role of central banks,” Ms. Smith pounced:

Notice how Bernanke invokes a “global consensus,” which is wonderfully vague and ignores the fact that the pre-crisis “global consensus” of minimally regulated markets and financial institutions, is precisely what caused the crisis.  Moreover, even if the Fed’s mandate in theory was appropriate, its governance structure is not.  The Bank of England and the ECB are not peculiar largely private institutions, accountable to almost no one, as the Fed now is.  The Fed’s insistence on secrecy regarding many of its emergency operations is unwarranted and deeply troubling.  And “the Fed played a major role in arresting the crisis” ignores the fact that the Fed played a major role in creating it, namely, via negative real interest rates for a protracted period.  And he is declaring the Fed’s policies to be successful when the jury is still out.

Brenanke’s claim that the idiotic bank stress tests “marked a turning point in public confidence in the banking system” invited a well-deserved attack.  Here’s how Yves Smith handled it:

The worst is the folks at the Fed clearly believe the bogus stress tests were a meaningful exercise.  That alone should disqualify them from getting a bigger role in bank supervision.  And if you read their pronouncements, they plan to continue to use them, and have the process run by …  monetary economists!  Pray tell, what do they know about bank operations?  Help me!  And some of the help the Fed has enlisted in the stress test exercise includes the consulting firm McKinsey, which has the biggest banking practice in the consulting industry.  Think McKinsey is going to devise anything that might be rough on its biggest meal tickets?

Remember that these negative reactions to the Bernanke article are just what appeared on Sunday.  By the time the confirmation hearings begin on December 3, you can be sure that Bernanke’s own words from the Post column will be used against him.  We may find that his decision to write this piece was a crucial turning point leading to a decision against his confirmation.



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An Ominous Drumbeat Gets Louder

August 13th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized
Aug, 13 2009
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August 13, 2009

Regular readers of this blog (all four of them) know that I have been very skeptical about the current “bear market rally” in the stock markets.  Nevertheless, the rally has continued.  However, we are now beginning to hear opinions from experts claiming that not only is this rally about to end — we could be headed for some real trouble.

Some commentators are currently discussing “The September Effect” and looking at how the stock market indices usually drop during the month of September.  Brett Arends gave us a detailed history of the September Effect in Tuesday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal.

Throughout the summer rally, a number of analysts focused on the question of how this rally could be taken seriously with such thin trading volume.  When the indices dropped on Monday, many blamed the decline on the fact that it was the lowest volume day for 2009.  However, take a look at Kate Gibson’s discussion of this situation for MarketWatch:

One market technician believes trading volume in recent days on the S&P 500 is a sign that the broad market gauge will test last month’s lows, then likely fall under its March low either next month or in October.

The decline in volume started on Friday and suggests the S&P 500 will make a new low beneath its July 8 bottom of 869.32, probably next week, on the way to a test in September or October of its March 6 intraday low of 666.79, said Tony Cherniawski, chief investment officer at Practical Investor, a financial advisory firm.

“In a normal breakout, you get rising volume. In this case, we had rising volume for a while; then it really dropped off last week,” said Cherniawski, who ascribes the recent rise in equities to “a huge short-covering rally.”

The S&P has rallied more than 50 percent from its March lows, briefly slipping in late June and early July.

Friday’s rise on the S&P 500 to a new yearly high was not echoed on the Nasdaq Composite Index, bringing more fodder to the bearish side, Cherniawski said.

“Whenever you have tops not confirmed by another major index, that’s another sign something fishy is going on,” he said.

What impressed me about Mr. Cherniawski’s statement is that, unlike most prognosticators, he gave us a specific time frame of “next week” to observe a 137-point drop in the S&P 500 index, leading to a further decline “in September or October” to the Hadean low of 666.

At CNNMoney.com, the question was raised as to whether the stock market had become the latest bubble created by the Federal Reserve:

The Federal Reserve has spent the past year cleaning up after a housing bubble it helped create.  But along the way it may have pumped up another bubble, this time in stocks.

*   *   *

But while most people take the rise in stocks as a hopeful sign for the economy, some see evidence that the Fed has been financing a speculative mania that could end in another damaging rout.

One important event that gave everyone a really good scare took place on Tuesday’s Morning Joe program on MSNBC.  Elizabeth Warren, Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel (responsible for scrutiny of the TARP bailout program) discussed the fact that the “toxic assets” which had been the focus of last fall’s financial crisis, were still on the books of the banks.  Worse yet, “Turbo” Tim Geithner’s PPIP (Public-Private Investment Program) designed to relieve the banks of those toxins, has now morphed into something that will help only the “big” banks (Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, et al.) holding “securitized” mortgages.  The banks not considered “too big to fail”, holding non-securitized “whole” loans, will now be left to twist in the wind on Geithner’s watch.  The complete interview can be seen here.  This disclosure resulted in some criticism of the Obama administration, coming from sources usually supportive of the current administration. Here’s what The Huffington Post had to say:

Warren, who’s been leading the call of late to reconcile the shoddy assets weighing down the bank sector, warned of a looming commercial mortgage crisis.  And even though Wall Street has steadied itself in recent weeks, smaller banks will likely need more aid, Warren said.

Roughly half of the $700 billion bailout, Warren added, was “don’t ask, don’t tell money. We didn’t ask how they were going to spend it, and they didn’t tell how they were going to spend it.”

She also took a passing shot at Tim Geithner – at one point, comparing Geithner’s handling of the bailout money to a certain style of casino gambling.  Geithner, she said, was throwing smaller portions of bailout money at several economic pressure points.

“He’s doing the sort of $2 bets all over the table in Vegas,” Warren joked.

David Corn, a usually supportive member of the White House press corps, reacted with indignation over Warren’s disclosures in an article entitled:  “An Economic Time Bomb Being Mishandled by the Obama Administration?”  He pulled no punches:

What’s happened is that accounting changes have made it easier for banks to contend with these assets. But this bad stuff hasn’t gone anywhere.  It’s literally been papered over. And it still has the potential to wreak havoc.  As the report puts it:

If the economy worsens, especially if unemployment remains elevated or if the commercial real estate market collapses, then defaults will rise and the troubled assets will continue to deteriorate in value.  Banks will incur further losses on their troubled assets.  The financial system will remain vulnerable to the crisis conditions that TARP was meant to fix.

*   *   *

In a conference call with a few reporters (myself included), Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor heading the Congressional Oversight Panel, noted that the biggest toxic assets threat to the economy could come not from the behemoth banks but from the “just below big” banks.  These institutions have not been the focus of Treasury efforts because their troubled assets are generally “whole loans” (that is, regular loans), not mortgage securities, and these less-than-big banks have been stuck with a lot of the commercial real estate loans likely to default in the next year or two.  Given that the smaller institutions are disproportionately responsible for providing credit to small businesses, Warren said, “if they are at risk, that has implications for the stability of the entire banking system and for economic recovery.”  Recalling that toxic assets were once the raison d’etre of TARP, she added, “Toxic assets posed a very real threat to our economy and have not yet been resolved.”

Yes, you’ve heard about various government efforts to deal with this mess.  With much hype, Secretary Timothy Geithner in March unveiled a private-public plan to buy up this financial waste.  But the program has hardly taken off, and it has ignored a big chunk of the problem (those”whole loans”).

*   *   *

The Congressional Oversight Panel warned that “troubled assets remain a substantial danger” and that this junk–which cannot be adequately valued–“can again become the trigger for instability.”  Warren’s panel does propose several steps the Treasury Department can take to reduce the risks.  But it’s frightening that Treasury needs to be prodded by Warren and her colleagues, who characterized troubled assets as “the most serious risk to the American financial system.”

On Wednesday morning’s CNBC program, Squawk Box, Nassim Taleb (author of the book, Black Swan — thus earning that moniker as his nickname) had plenty of harsh criticism for the way the financial and economic situations have been mishandled.  You can see the interview with him and Nouriel Roubini here, along with CNBC’s discussion of his criticisms:

“It is a matter of risk and responsibility, and I think the risks that were there before, these problems are still there,” he said. “We still have a very high level of debt, we still have leadership that’s literally incompetent …”

“They did not see the problem, they don’t look at the core of problem.  There’s an elephant in the room and they did not identify it.”

Pointing his finger directly at Fed Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and President Obama, Taleb said policymakers need to begin converting debt into equity but instead are continuing the programs that created the financial crisis.

“I don’t think that structural changes have been addressed,” he said.  “It doesn’t look like they’re fully aware of the problem, or they’re overlooking it because they don’t want to take hard medicine.”

With Bernanke’s term running out, Taleb said Obama would be making a mistake by reappointing the Fed chairman.

Just in case you aren’t scared yet, I’d like to direct your attention to Aaron Task’s interview with stock market prognosticator, Robert Prechter, on Aaron’s Tech Ticker internet TV show, which can be seen at the Yahoo Finance site.  Here’s how some of Prechter’s discussion was summarized:

“The big question is whether the rally is over,” Prechter says, suggesting “countertrend moves can be tricky” to predict.  But the veteran market watcher is “quite sure the next wave down is going to be larger than what we’ve already experienced,” and take major averages well below their March 2009 lows.

“Well below” the Hadean low of 666?  Now that’s really scary!

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Obama Unveils His Most Ambitious Plan

June 18th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized
Jun, 18 2009
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June 18, 2009

On Wednesday, June 18, President Obama released his anxiously-awaited, 88-page proposal to reform the financial regulatory system.  An angry public, having seen its jobs and savings disappear as home values took a nosedive, has been ready to set upon the culprits responsible for the economic meltdown.  Nevertheless, the lynch mobs don’t seem too anxious to string up former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan.  Perhaps because he is so old, they might likely prefer to see him die a slow, painful death from some naturally-occurring degenerative disease.  Meanwhile, a website, Greenspan’s Body Count, has been keeping track of the number of suicides resulting from the recent financial collapse.  (The current total is 96.)  As usual, President Obama has been encouraging us all to “look forward”.  (Sound familiar?  . . . as in:   “Forget about war crimes prosecutions because some Democrats might also find themselves wearing orange jumpsuits.”)

In reacting to Obama’s new financial reform initiative, some critics have observed that the failure to oust those officials responsible for our current predicament, could set us up for a repeat experience.  For example, The Hill quoted the assessment of Dean Baker, Co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research:

However, the big downside to this reform proposal is the implication that the problem was the regulations and not the regulators.  The reality is that the Fed had all the power it needed to rein in the housing bubble, which is the cause of the current crisis.  However, they chose to ignore its growth, either not recognizing or not caring that its collapse would devastate the economy. If regulators are not held accountable for such a monumental failure (e.g., by getting fired), then they have no incentive to ever stand up to the financial industry.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Smart Money magazine provided some similarly-skeptical criticisms of this plan:

Influential bank analyst Richard Bove of Rochedale Securities believes the Obama rules will only add costs to the system and will not lead to more effective oversight.  After all, a regulatory framework is already in place, Bove says, but the political will to enforce it has been absent — and that’s just the way Washington wants it.  Indeed, the only truly aggressive SEC director since the Kennedy administration was Harvey Pitt, Bove says. “[And] when he got religion about regulation, he got removed.”

Dr. Walter Gerasimowicz of New York-based Meditron Asset Management is dubious about a number of proposals, especially that of expanding the Fed’s role.  “What I find to be very disconcerting is the fact that our Federal Reserve is going to have extensive power over much of the industry,” Gerasimowicz says.  “Why would we give the Fed such powers, especially when they’ve failed over the past 10 years to monitor, to warn, or to bring these types of speculative bubbles under control?”

Our government was kind enough to provide us with an Executive Summary of the financial reform proposal.  Here is how that summary explains the “five key objectives” of the plan, along with the general recommendations for achieving those objectives:

(1)  Promote robust supervision and regulation of financial firms.  Financial institutions that are critical to market functioning should be subject to strong oversight.  No financial firm that poses a significant risk to the financial system should be unregulated or weakly regulated.  We need clear accountability in financial oversight and supervision.  We propose:

  • A new Financial Services Oversight Council of financial regulators to identify emerging systemic risks and improve interagency cooperation.
  • New authority for the Federal Reserve to supervise all firms that could pose a threat to financial stability, even those that do not own banks.
  • Stronger capital and other prudential standards for all financial firms, and even higher standards for large, interconnected firms.
  • A new National Bank Supervisor to supervise all federally chartered banks.
  • Elimination of the federal thrift charter and other loopholes that allowed some depository institutions to avoid bank holding company regulation by the Federal Reserve.
  • The registration of advisers of hedge funds and other private pools of capital with the SEC.

(2)  Establish comprehensive supervision of financial markets. Our major financial markets must be strong enough to withstand both system-wide stress and the failure of one or more large institutions. We propose:

  • Enhanced regulation of securitization markets, including new requirements for market transparency, stronger regulation of credit rating agencies, and a requirement that issuers and originators retain a financial interest in securitized loans.
  • Comprehensive regulation of all over-the-counter derivatives.
  • New authority for the Federal Reserve to oversee payment, clearing, and settlement systems.

(3)  Protect consumers and investors from financial abuse.  To rebuild trust in our markets, we need strong and consistent regulation and supervision of consumer financial services and investment markets.  We should base this oversight not on speculation or abstract models, but on actual data about how people make financial decisions.  We must promote transparency, simplicity, fairness, accountability, and access. We propose:

  • A new Consumer Financial Protection Agency to protect consumers across the financial sector from unfair, deceptive, and abusive practices.
  • Stronger regulations to improve the transparency, fairness, and appropriateness of consumer and investor products and services.
  • A level playing field and higher standards for providers of consumer financial products and services, whether or not they are part of a bank.

(4)  Provide the government with the tools it needs to manage financial crises.  We need to be sure that the government has the tools it needs to manage crises, if and when they arise, so that we are not left with untenable choices between bailouts and financial collapse.  We propose:

  • A new regime to resolve nonbank financial institutions whose failure could have serious systemic effects.
  • Revisions to the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending authority to improve accountability.

(5)  Raise international regulatory standards and improve international cooperation.  The challenges we face are not just American challenges, they are global challenges.  So, as we work to set high regulatory standards here in the United States, we must ask the world to do the same.  We propose:

  • International reforms to support our efforts at home, including strengthening the capital framework; improving oversight of global financial markets; coordinating supervision of internationally active firms; and enhancing crisis management tools.

In addition to substantive reforms of the authorities and practices of regulation and supervision, the proposals contained in this report entail a significant restructuring of our regulatory system.  We propose the creation of a Financial Services Oversight Council, chaired by Treasury and including the heads of the principal federal financial regulators as members.  We also propose the creation of two new agencies. We propose the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which will be an independent entity dedicated to consumer protection in credit, savings, and payments markets. We also propose the creation of the National Bank Supervisor, which will be a single agency with separate status in Treasury with responsibility for federally chartered depository institutions.  To promote national coordination in the insurance sector, we propose the creation of an Office of National Insurance within Treasury.

So there you have it.  Most commentators expect that the real fighting over this plan won’t begin until this fall, with healthcare reform taking center stage until that time.  Regardless of whatever form this financial reform initiative takes by the time it is enacted, it will ultimately be seen by history as Barack Obama’s brainchild.  If this plan turns out to be a disaster, it could overshadow whatever foreign policy accomplishments may lie ahead for this administration.

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