One day Standard Chartered bank and its powerful allies are complaining that New York's bank regulator, Benjamin Lawsky, has overreached and saying that, at most, they had laundered only $14 million for Iran. The next day -- as in today -- Standard Chartered is agreeing to pay a $340 million civil penalty to settle Lawsky's suit and agreeing, explicitly, that Lawsky's original figure of laundered funds -- a whopping $250 billion -- was correct.
Sixteen years ago, when Bill Clinton signed a harsh welfare reform law, one upside seemed to be that U.S. society could move past the endless, polarizing debate about welfare dependency.
Ben Protess made an interesting comparison today in a DealBook article on the rise of CFTC Chief Gary Gensler and the agency's successful work on the LIBOR rate fixing scandal:
Pennsylvania state court judge Robert Simpson refused to issue a preliminary injunction against the state’s controversial voter ID legislation today, despite allegations that the law was discriminatory and passed for partisan gain.
Ben Protess made an interesting comparison today in a DealBook article on the rise of CFTC Chief Gary Gensler and the agency's successful work on the LIBOR rate fixing scandal:
Washington is finally moving to better regulate the real estate appraisal industry, with regulators yesterday proposing new rules to strengthen appraiser independence.
An interesting proposal will be on the ballot this fall in Michigan. The measure, put forth by Michigan Energy, Michigan Jobs, would increase the state’s renewable energy requirement to 25 percent by 2025, more than double what it is today. The ballot measure would place this requirement in the state’s constitution, which would make it less susceptible to being overturned and also allow citizen’s to dictate the state’s energy future.
Today, the last state enrolled in a federal program designed to keep unemployment checks flowing, Idaho, lost its eligibility.
In 2010, Federal-State Extended Benefits program enrolled over a million people. Why stop the benefits while the national unemployment rate remains over 8%? The Wall Street Journal reports on the reason for its demise:
A Georgetown Public Policy Institute report shows the degree to which the Great Recession has exacerbated the education gap. Not only did workers without a college degree lose “nearly four out of five jobs during the recession,” but the least-educated workers, those without high school degrees, have continued to lose jobs during the recovery.
It's well known that seniors are easy prey for scam artists of every kind. What is less well-known is how big this problem is and how many of the scam artists wear suits and work for major financial service firms. Seniors were major targets of mortgage brokers seeking to push homeowners into subprime loans and win higher commissions. Seniors also get exploited by investment advisors pushing lousy annuity policies and other dubious financial products.
One clear path to retirement security is to buy a home early in life and pay off it before you retire -- at which point you can either live there at a pretty low cost or cash out and use the wealth to help cover living expenses in a cheaper place.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has issued a recall for over 2.3 million toilets after hundreds of people were injured. The recall applies to units manufactured between October 1997 and February 2008. Aside from being my own personal nightmare, that is an astonishing amount of manufacturer neglect in terms of number of units affected and duration of time covered. In essence, Flushmate manufactured potentially shoddy units for nearly a decade.
New York continues to suffer from high unemployment. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has new data that indicates that, of all the states, only New York had a “statistically significant over-the-year increase in its unemployment rate (+0.9%).”
Voter ID isn’t the only law unjustly limiting citizen's voting rights. In an excellent piece for Salon, Erik Nielson illuminates the widespread disenfranchisement of convicted felons. Although state laws vary in severity, all but two have some sort of restrictions preventing convicted felons from voting.
Economic inequality is a famously complex phenomenon, but some parts of this trend are quite simple: Like how today's rich are benefiting from a rare confluence of record high compensation and record low taxes.
