Congress resolved the shutdown and debt ceiling crisis (for now) by agreeing to hash out a budget agreement by mid-December. Already, hopes are dim. Budget experts say that if any deal at all is worked out to replace the deep budget cuts that went into effect in March, the most likely outcome will be a short-term plan involving slightly less severe spending cuts—but with no new revenue, a big Democratic priority.
On September 15, the fifth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, progressives toasted a victory.
True, thanks to Congressional timidity, the biggest banks have only gotten bigger since the financial crisis five years ago, and the men (yes, mostly men) in charge of them are mostly still in charge. But Larry Summers, the architect of a good chunk of the deregulation that set the stage for the crisis in the first place, had withdrawn his name from consideration to be chair of the Federal Reserve, thanks to a populist uprising within the Democratic Party.
Three and a half years have passed since the afternoon when the stock markets went into a trillion-dollar free fall and just as suddenly reversed course, recovering 80 percent of that loss. It all happened in less than 45 minutes.
If you're going to have a raucous, costumed march in New York City, Midtown makes for a great setting. Nurses and HIV activists in Robin Hood hats took the streets yesterday, blocking traffic as they called for a financial transaction tax to fully fund healthcare and other public services. Chants of “People, not profits! Medicare for all!” filled rush-hour streets as business-suited professionals dodged through the crowds.
Blythe Masters is the most recognizable woman on Wall Street—and arguably its most resilient. At 44, she heads the largest commodities trading operation at the largest bank in the U.S., JPMorgan Chase (JPM). In the mid-1990s she developed and marketed credit derivatives, which rapidly became a new wonder of high finance.
After a marathon hearing that wrapped up in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the City Council of Richmond, Calif., voted to allow the use of eminent domain to seize underwater mortgages, becoming the first city in the nation to take such a concrete step toward the novel and risky strategy for helping people avoid foreclosure.
President Obama met with the nation’s top financial regulators last week, to urge for rulings associated with the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform law passed more than three years ago. It was the first time the president convened a sit down with each regulator since 2011.
According to a White House statement, Obama “stressed the need to expeditiously finish implementing the critical remaining portions of Wall Street Reform to ensure we are able to prevent the type of financial harm that lead to the Great Recession from ever happening again.” [...]
Picking a new chairman of the Federal Reserve may be the most important nomination a president can make. The next Fed chair will play an instrumental role in determining the future trajectory of America’s straggling recovery, and determining how financial regulation gets implemented.
Financial markets, now heavily dependent on technology, need to be safeguarded against cyberattacks, natural disasters and the more prosaic scourge of human error that can cause massive disruptions, according to experts and a federal panel.
Without a doubt, the big banks should be broken up; the need is even more urgent than it was in 2007 or 2008. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas – hardly an Occupy Wall Street affiliate – titled its 2011 Annual Report "Choosing the Road to Prosperity: Why We Must End Too Big to Fail – Now."
Regulators in the United Kingdom are looking into allegations that traders from some of the world's largest banks have been manipulating benchmark foreign-exchange rates to make profits on the backs of clients.
Bloomberg News broke the story earlier this week, citing interviews with several anonymous traders who claim the practice has been occurring for at least 10 years. [...]
We have learned, painfully, of the damage derivatives can do to an economy in a financial crisis. But derivatives are hurting the economy even on its best days, according to a new study.
New rules to regulate derivatives, adopted last week by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, are a victory for Wall Street and a setback for financial reform. They may also signal worse things to come.
The banks have systematically figured out how to rip off the government,” Lerner says.
Part of that ripoff was the LIBOR scandal, which had a “massive consequence on everything,” according to Wallace Turbeville, a former Goldman Sachs employee and current senior fellow at nonpartisan think tank Demos.
Massive fraud in the high-speed trading markets is escaping detection because regulators and exchanges are dithering on a powerful supercomputer to uncover the scams, The Post has learned.
And as retail investors begin dipping their toes back into stocks, now at record prices, the market watchdogs are asleep at the wheel.
WASHINGTON -- A bipartisan cadre of House lawmakers will move on legislation to deregulate Wall Street derivatives Wednesday, less than a week after Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) released adevastating report on the multibillion-dollar derivatives debacle at JPMorgan Chase.