WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Massachusetts Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren is likely to focus her efforts on the Senate Banking Committee in areas that go far beyond her bread-and-butter expertise in consumer protection, analysts say.
No doubt the new International Energy Agency (IEA)'s latest World Energy Outlook will be cause for celebration for the fossil fuel industry. In it, IEA points to the strong oil and gas production in the U.S. and predicts that by within a decade or so, the U.S. will become the world's largest oil producer, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Russia. By 2030, North America could be a net oil exporter and, around the same time, the U.S. will likely be energy independent.
It's a sign of our shadowy times that the latest regulatory "reform" bill hasn't been laughed out of Washington. Same goes for the latest bankers' complaint, this time about being asked to cover their own bets. And if you think it's bad now, wait and see what happens if Romney takes over.
Think "global catastrophe."
While bank-friendly politicians offer insipid legislation, the world economy is still at risk. And it could get worse.
The last presidential debate not only continued the silence on climate change, it also advanced the false narrative that we have to choose between economic growth and action on climate change. While the candidates focused on how to keep gas prices down, increase energy independence, and create jobs, they never addressed how we can use our energy plan to fight climate change. By refusing to address climate consequences, both candidates reinforce the idea that we either focus on economic growth or we focus on the environment, but not both.
In politics, there inevitably comes the dreaded time when politics and politicking run into reality. It is the point at which you can no longer appease two opposing parties and a decision must be made that chooses one party's interests over the other. I imagine politicians hate this moment because it shows their true character, for better or worse.
Four years ago today, Lehman Brothers collapsed as Hank Paulson and his colleagues made the fateful decision that free market principles demanded that at least one bank crippled by the deteriorating financial system had to be sacrificed at the altar of moral hazard. These “deciders” had no idea of the firestorm they were igniting. They did not foresee that the financial system that had evolved during 30 years of deregulation (based on specious economic theory and ideology) was so interconnected that it would collapse like a house of cards. Within a few weeks, the U.S.
The newest GDP release shows an increase of 1.5 percent in the second quarter of 2012, down from a 1.9 percent growth in the first quarter and three percent growth in 2011. But, as Demos continually asks in our Beyond GDP work: What exactly is GDP measuring?
The days between the Fourth of July and Bastille Day on the 14th are known for fireworks on both sides of the Atlantic. This year, more rockets and firecrackers than usual were going off, but they were inside hearing rooms in the British Parliament and the U.S. Congress. Barclays bank announced that it had been fined more than $450 million by regulators from both countries, and its CEO, Robert E. Diamond Jr., and COO, Jerry del Missier, both resigned. The fines were part of a settlement that granted Barclays immunity from potentially worse punishment for its manipulation of interest rates.
One of the big questions environmentalists struggle with is whether there should be a price on nature. For some things, like the cost savings that are realized through cleaner air or water, there is a rote calculation that can be done to price out environmental and health benefits. But, if you think of nature as an independent entity having a worth beyond what it can provide to humans, how do you put a price on it? How much is the Amazon River or the Himalayan mountain range worth?
Every day brings more reminders of the terrible unfairness that besets our country, the tragic reversal of fortune experienced by millions who once had good lives and steady jobs, now gone.
An article in the current issue of Rolling Stone chronicles “The Fallen: The Sharp, Sudden Decline of America’s Middle Class” and describes a handful of middle-class men and women made homeless, forced to live out of their cars in church parking lots in Southern California.
The movement has drawn some support from financial circles. Wallace C. Turbeville, a former Goldman Sachs banker who now is a senior fellow at Demos, a public policy research organization in New York,submitted testimony last month for the Senate Banking Committee in favor of more banking regulation.
One of the main reason alternative indicators are important is that they take things that we value on a visceral level, like the environment, and put them into the universal language of capital.
Ahead of Rio+20, advocates are coalescing around the idea that we need to change the way we measure what is important to achieve true sustainable development. Currently countries measure economic growth, which is often equated with progress, through GDP. However, growth in GDP is increasingly not resulting in progress.
The J.P. Morgan Chase JPM -0.68% & Co. unit whose wrong-way bets on corporate credit cost the bank more than $2 billion includes a group that has invested in financially challenged companies, including LightSquared Inc., the wireless broadband provider that this month filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The full details of JP Morgan’s trading strategy aren’t known, but Wallace Turbeville, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker and currently a fellow with public policy think-tank Demos, doesn’t buy the bank’s explanation that it was simply hedging. “How can you possibly lose that kind of money on a hedge?” he asks. “The answer is, they weren’t off setting risk.
Last summer, a Western Beef store in the East Tremont section of the South Bronx became the first supermarket in the city to receive funding through the city’s Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) program. The FRESH initiative provides financial and zoning incentives to entice supermarket chains to build new stores in neighborhoods that lack access to fresh, wholesome foods.
Last summer, on her final day as the Chairman of the FDIC, Shelia Bair decried the short-termism that has overtaken both Wall Street and Washington, where “[o]ur financial markets remain too focused on quick profits, and our political process is driven by a two-year election cycle and its relentless demands for fundraising.” This short-termism has taken hold of the reins of our larger political system and increasingly characterizes policy initiatives at every level of government.
The derivatives industry is squeezing Washington like a python. Desperate to control the tone and thrust of derivatives regulation, industry lobbyists have been swarming over the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, each of which is writing derivatives rules as mandated by the Dodd-Frank reform law.
Here we go again. Another round of the game we call Congressional Creep. After months of haggling and debate, Congress finally passes reform legislation to fix a serious rupture in the body politic, and the president signs it into law. But the fight’s just begun, because the special interests immediately set out to win back what they lost when the reform became law.
A lesson in how not to reduce gas prices: the White House is backing TransCanada’s bid to build the southern portion of the controversial pipeline Keystone XL pipeline. The section to be built will run from Cushing, Oklahoma to Texas and carry crude oil pumped in the Midwest to refineries in Texas and be completed by late 2013—so it will have virtually no impact on the current high gas prices.