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.
In the latest anti-HFT salvo, a 12-year veteran of Goldman Sachs Monday applied a new definition to the essence of high frequency trading, seeing it as a purposeful distortion of the flow of market information rather than just a successful trading technique. With that he also prescribed a financial transaction tax as part of a cure.
You may have seen a big outbreak in the academic literature and business media of defenses of liquidity for liquidity’s sake, evidently prompted by increased interest in and in the EU, implementation of transaction taxes as a way to tame speculation and secondarily raise revenues.
During an appearance on CNBC yesterday, Charlie Munger, deputy to billionaire investor Warren Buffett, had some harsh words for high-frequency trading, the practice used by huge financial firms to trade stocks in milliseconds. “Take the rapid trading by the computer geniuses with the computer algorithms,” said Munger. “Those people have all the social utility of a bunch of rats admitted to a granary.”
Though technology and innovation have squeezed trading costs, the industry's profits are accounting for a bigger share of U.S. GDP, a former Goldman banker says, needlessly diverting some $635 bln from the broader economy. It lends credence to ideas like a transaction tax.
Before the Great Recession, the financial sector had consistently been eating up a greater and greater share of the economy. In 2007, it accounted for a whopping 40 percent of corporate profits. Before 1950, the financial sector made up less than 3 percent of GDP; now it makes up more than 8 percent.
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.