Showing posts with label Federal Reserve System. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Federal Reserve System. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Commissions Composed Of Cretins?

Cover of "Plunder and Blunder: The Rise a...Cover via Amazon

The Deficit Commission Tsunami

During the mass unemployment of the Great Depression, Keynes once quipped that if we couldn't find any productive work that needed to be done, in order to reduce unemployment we could just pay workers to dig holes and fill them up again. Keynes was being sarcastic, but it seems that the Washington crew picked up on this suggestion. This is the only plausible explanation for the proliferation of deficit commissions in our nation's capital.There are three separate deficit commissions prepared to share their wisdom with the American people before the end of the year. These three commissions all have two important features in common: not one member of these commissions warned of the catastrophe that would be created by the collapse of the housing bubble, and they all think it is a good idea to cut Social Security.
The country is currently experiencing its worst economic downturn in 70 years with more than 25 million people unemployed, underemployed or having given up looking for work altogether. It might have been appropriate for a commission that purports to be giving advice on the future of the country's most important social programs, as well as the overall budget, to include at least one person who was awake enough to notice the $8 trillion housing bubble that wrecked the economy.
But these commissions that want to tell the public what is best for us don't feel that they need to bother with trivialities like the economic collapse. In fact, the commissions include many of the people who had helped guide our economy off the cliff. They see their credentials in this capacity as lending to their credibility. This is sort of like an officer from the Titanic using this experience as a basis for being appointed ship's captain.
In fact, these commissions don't have much other than their credentials to support their recommendations for cutting Social Security and Medicare. While the media have been hyperventilating at length to try to build fears about the budget deficits, it is easy to show that these fears are unwarranted.
In the short term, the United States has large budget deficits for the simple reason that private sector spending collapsed. The arithmetic is straightforward. The collapse of the bubbles in residential and nonresidential real estate led to a plunge in annual construction demand of more than $600 billion a year. The indirect effect of the loss of $6 trillion in housing bubble wealth was to reduce annual consumption by $600 billion a year.
With a total loss of $1.2 trillion in private sector demand, the choice for the government is either to boost the economy by running large deficits or allow the economy to contract further and let the unemployment rate rise even higher. If our deficit hawk commission members knew their economics, they would have been warning of the housing bubble in 2002-2006. Then, we could have avoided this economic collapse - and we would have had smaller deficits.
It is important to realize that the debt that we are incurring at present need pose zero burden on future generations. We are putting to use resources that would otherwise be idle, not pulling resources away from the private sector. While the deficit hawks eagerly threaten us with the prospect of our children paying interest on trillions of dollars of debt, the Federal Reserve Board could simply buy and hold this debt, leading to no net interest burden on future generations. (The Treasury pays interest on the debt to the Fed, which then refunds the interest payments to the Treasury at the end of the year, leaving no net interest burden.)
While the longer-term projections do show a serious deficit problem even after the economy has recovered, this is due to projections of exploding health care costs. Since more than half of our health care is paid by the public sector, if health costs really do grow out of control, then it will lead to very serious budget problems. Of course, if health care costs follow the projected path then they will also devastate the private sector.
The point is that we have a health care problem. If we don't fix our health care system, then our economy will be in serious trouble, with one problem being large budget deficits. If we do fix our health care system, then there is no long-term deficit problem.
The basic story is that, in the short term, there is no deficit problem; the problem is a plunge in private sector demand caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. In the longer term, the deficit problem is actually the problem of a broken health care system. The facts are as clear as can be.
So, why then do we have all these deficit commissions? It's simply modern Washington's way of digging holes and filling them up again. It gives these people something to do. Let's hope it ends up being harmless.
Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer ( www.conservativenannystate.org) and the more recently published Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of The Bubble Economy. He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues. 
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Monday, August 9, 2010

The AIG Bailout Scandal

American International GroupImage via Wikipedia

The AIG Bailout Scandal

by William Greider
The government's $182 billion bailout of insurance giant AIG should be seen as the Rosetta Stone for understanding the financial crisis and its costly aftermath. The story of American International Group explains the larger catastrophe not because this was the biggest corporate bailout in history but because AIG's collapse and subsequent rescue involved nearly all the critical elements, including delusion and deception. These financial dealings are monstrously complicated, but this account focuses on something mere mortals can understand-moral confusion in high places, and the failure of governing institutions to fulfill their obligations to the public.
Three governmental investigative bodies have now pored through the AIG wreckage and turned up disturbing facts-the House Committee on Oversight and Reform; the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which will make its report at year's end; and the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP), which issued its report on AIG in June.
The five-member COP, chaired by Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, has produced the most devastating and comprehensive account so far. Unanimously adopted by its bipartisan members, it provides alarming insights that should be fodder for the larger debate many citizens long to hear-why Washington rushed to forgive the very interests that produced this mess, while innocent others were made to suffer the consequences. The Congressional panel's critique helps explain why bankers and their Washington allies do not want Elizabeth Warren to chair the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The report concludes that the Federal Reserve Board's intimate relations with the leading powers of Wall Street-the same banks that benefited most from the government's massive bailout-influenced its strategic decisions on AIG. The panel accuses the Fed and the Treasury Department of brushing aside alternative approaches that would have saved tens of billions in public funds by making these same banks "share the pain."
Bailing out AIG effectively meant rescuing Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Merrill Lynch (as well as a dozens of European banks) from huge losses. Those financial institutions played the derivatives game with AIG, the esoteric practice of placing financial bets on future events. AIG lost its bets, which led to its collapse. But other gamblers-the counterparties in AIG's derivative deals-were made whole on their bets, paid off 100 cents on the dollar. Taxpayers got stuck with the bill.
"The AIG rescue demonstrated that Treasury and the Federal Reserve would commit taxpayers to pay any price and bear any burden to prevent the collapse of America's largest financial institutions," the COP report said. This could have been avoided, the report argues, if the Fed had listened to disinterested advisers with a less parochial understanding of the public interest.
Fed and Treasury officials dismiss this critique as second-guessing of tough decisions they had to make in the fall of 2008, amid the fast-moving global crisis. Yet two years later, those controversial decisions remain highly relevant. Public anger has not abated. It fuels the election turmoil that this year threatens to bring down incumbents in both parties who voted for bank bailouts.
Although the AIG bailout was carried out in the waning days of George W. Bush's presidency, the popular sense of injustice has deeply scarred Barack Obama, since he too adopted a forgiving approach toward culpable financial interests. Obama came to office intent on restoring public trust in government. His indulgence of the mega-banks led to the opposite result.
More to the point, the AIG story raises real doubts and suspicions about how the government will respond next time. Or whether the new financial reform legislation actually corrects government's deference to the pinnacles of private financial power. Massive federal intervention was certainly necessary, the Warren panel agrees, including quick action to forestall AIG's bankruptcy. But government declined to demand anything in return.
The AIG rescue was done in ways that had "poisonous effects" on the financial marketplace and public opinion, the report concluded. Cynical expectations were confirmed, both for citizens and financial players. Some financial firms are simply "too big to fail," it seems; Washington will not let them collapse, no matter what the president claims.
The most troubling revelation in this story is the astonishing weakness of the Federal Reserve and its incompetence as a faithful defender of the public interest. In the lore of central banking, the Fed is awesomely powerful and intimidating. As regulator of the banking system, it has life-and-death influence over banks. As manager of the economy, it has open-ended authority to intervene in the financial system to restore stability, as the central bank did massively during the crisis.
Yet the Fed was strangely passive and compliant when it came to demanding cooperation and sacrifice from the largest financial institutions. Timothy Geithner was then president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, the lead regulator of Wall Street's largest banks. He briefly insisted they must accept the burden of rescuing AIG. But the bankers called his bluff and blew him off-and Geithner deferred to their wishes. The taxpayer bailout followed. The episode is relevant to the future, because Geithner is now Obama's Treasury Secretary and in charge of preventing the next taxpayer bailout.
In the early autumn of 2008, mayhem swept through global financial markets. It engulfed AIG on Monday morning, September 15. Lehman Brothers had just failed. Panicky credit markets were seizing up. American International Group, largest insurance company in the world, was hemorrhaging capital, rapidly sinking toward bankruptcy. At the New York Fed, Geithner had the problem covered, or so he thought.
Geithner informed top executives of Wall Street's most important financial houses-Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs-that the banking industry, not the Federal Reserve, must step up and do the rescue. Geithner told them it was "inconceivable that the Federal Reserve could or should play any role in preventing AIG's collapse."
That Monday morning, Geithner summoned representatives from Goldman and the JPMorgan bank to Fed offices and told them to organize a private-sector consortium of major lenders to provide the emergency liquidity loans that would keep AIG afloat until things settled down. It was presumed JPMorgan would be the lead lender; Goldman, as an investment bank, could help AIG sell off assets to raise capital. Given the Fed's blessing, other banks were expected to cooperate.
The New York Fed president did not need to threaten anyone. This was the gentlemanly way in which the central bank can invoke its informal authority, with numerous precedents in the past. Prodded by the Fed and Treasury, major banks had done something similar back in 1998 to save the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management, whose collapse threatened a chain reaction on Wall Street. During the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, the Fed had used its overbearing influence to make leading US banks grant concessions and write down outstanding loans-a grudging "workout" that saved Mexico, Brazil and Argentina from default but also saved some famous New York banks from imploding.
This time, the entire system was at risk, so virtually everyone was vulnerable. Geithner expected the biggest banks to package a substantial bridge loan that would give AIG the time to sell assets and raise capital, an orderly resolution. After all, AIG was an insurance corporation, not a bank. The Fed had no direct regulatory authority over it. Geithner had gotten an early glimpse of AIG's troubles in the summer, when its CEO approached him and asked for access to the Fed's discount window, the place banks go for short-term liquidity loans. Geithner turned him down, but learned how deeply Wall Street and Europe's leading banks were entwined in AIG's troubles.
The problem was derivatives. During the housing bubble, AIG had reaped a fortune selling derivative contracts based on mortgage-backed securities-hedging devices that made investors feel safe holding these assets. When the bubble burst and housing securities plummeted in value, AIG's derivatives became its instrument of self-destruction. The counterparties, as per their contract, demanded immediate payment to cover their losses-more and more capital, as housing prices continued to fall. Goldman Sachs, almost alone among big banks, had bet right on the housing bubble. Now it was aggressively collecting on its bet.
The bankers' committee assembled at the Fed worked all day and into the night, joined by AIG, the New York State insurance regulators, with investment bank Morgan Stanley acting as Treasury's new adviser. The group drafted a "term sheet" that toted up AIG's exposure. It would need as much as $75 billion, they estimated.
In Washington, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson kept his distance, while fighting other bonfires. Paulson assured reporters the meeting under way at the New York Fed had nothing to do with a government bailout for AIG. "What's going on in New York is a private-sector effort," Paulson said.
Sometime after midnight, the bankers called to say, sorry, they were not interested. There would be no private-sector rescue. According to Thomas Baxter, general counsel at the New York Fed, notification came on Tuesday morning, not from the principal executives of Goldman and JPMorgan but from a bankruptcy lawyer, Marshall Huebner, advising JPMorgan on AIG's problems. The New York Fed immediately hired him as its own lawyer and proceeded to do what the bankers had refused to do-bail out AIG.
JPMorgan and Goldman offered no public explanation for rejecting Geithner's proposal. The public wasn't ever told the banks were asked to do their part. Nor did Federal Reserve officials argue with the decision or try to apply persuasive pressures. It did not put the squeeze on to convince the bankers they must accept some kind of sacrifice in the interest of sharing the pain. Nor did Geithner threaten to pursue an alternative strategy that could have forced the banks to negotiate the terms. This was considered out of the question, though the central bank has employed all these tools on past occasions.
In a subsequent hearing, Damon Silvers, the AFL-CIO policy director who is a member of Warren's oversight panel, asked Baxter, "When you're pulling together the private sector to solve a problem that they've created of the type that AIG represented, is it typical to accept no for an answer?" Baxter fudged. "Well, I started out by saying there was nothing typical about the crisis," he replied. He talked in circles and never answered the question.
If the bankers refused to participate, the Fed had to move fast to stanch the bleeding. AIG faced another downgrade from credit rating agencies (the same agencies that had given triple-A blessings to mortgage securities). The Fed adopted the bankers' "term sheet" as its operating guide and swiftly created a revolving credit fund of $85 billion.
Late on Tuesday, the central bank lent $12 billion to AIG. The next day, it lent another $12 billion. This was only the beginning. The AIG operation became a gigantic spigot for circuitously distributing public money to private banking interests. As the New York Fed pumped more money into AIG, the insurance giant pumped it right out the door to satisfy the demands from counterparties like Goldman Sachs. Having helped scuttle the private rescue, Goldman collected $13 billion from this backdoor public assistance. The Fed did not stop AIG's hemorrhage. It began financing it, with no questions asked.
The Fed has always insisted this financial daisy chain was not designed to pump more capital into the leading banks. "This was not about the banks," a senior vice president of the New York Fed told the New York Times. If not, then why did the Federal Reserve work so hard to keep their names secret? Fed lawyers labored for months to prevent disclosure of the beneficiaries. Ranking Federal Reserve governors coldly rejected as "inappropriate" the repeated Congressional demands to know the names. If it wasn't about helping those banks, why did the Fed not pause to reconsider its initial decision and develop a less costly approach? It became instead the paymaster for AIG's failed derivative contracts-conducting business as usual in the midst of national emergency.
This process continued for nearly two months and swelled to horrendous proportions before the Federal Reserve finally figured out a way to turn off the spigot. In November, it arranged a complex swap, known as "Maiden Lane," in which the government paid off counterparties, acquired the remaining derivative contracts and extinguished them. The bankers again collected roughly full value on assets that were then selling in financial markets for less than 50 cents on the dollar.
The Fed claimed victory for the public, but in reality the game was already lost, despite the generous public financing. AIG was facing another downgrade, and everyone understood this one would probably be fatal-triggering the bankruptcy the Fed had tried to avoid. After the bankers had gotten the money, they graciously agreed to settle.
Back in September, when the Federal Reserve hired JPMorgan's lawyer as its own, there was no public outcry because the public didn't know about it. Marshall Huebner of the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell was an expert in corporate bankruptcy and would help the Fed get up to speed quickly. The arrangement was not illegal and not unethical, given the precious distinctions the legal profession makes on ethics. JPMorgan gave its lawyer consent to switch sides, though Huebner's firm continued to represent the Morgan bank (Davis Polk graciously gave the Fed a 10 percent discount of Huebner's $1,000-an-hour billing rate). The Federal Reserve limited his advice to AIG matters. Huebner later also became Treasury's lawyer when it added TARP funds to AIG, though the Fed and Treasury do not have identical interests.
What was troublesome about swapping lawyers? There was a "third client" in this matter-the American public-who faced huge exposure to losses but didn't have its own lawyer in the room. The central bank, with its high sense of rectitude, would insist it represents the public interest. The Congressional Oversight Panel did not buy that.
The government, the Warren report said, "put the efforts to organize a private AIG rescue in the hands of only two banks, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, institutions that had severe conflicts of interest as they would have been among the largest beneficiaries of taxpayer rescue."
Once the immediate panic subsided, the Fed did not seek out alternative opinions and proposals on what to do next, either from independent debtor counsel or even from AIG's bankruptcy lawyer. "By failing to bring in other players, the government neglected to use all of its negotiating leverage," the report observed.
In fact, the Congressional Oversight Panel found an incestuous stew of private financial players in the AIG case, who switched their allegiance between public and private roles numerous times. Severely conflicted loyalties are commonplace on Wall Street. The Fed saw nothing wrong with it.
Goldman Sachs always claimed it was fully hedged against loss, even if AIG went bankrupt, but the oversight panel discovered a crucial gap in its protection. Goldman would have been more vulnerable if the Fed had succeeded in arranging a "voluntary" workout by the private banks. Such a deal could have compelled Goldman and other counterparties to make concessions-accept a "haircut," as Wall Street financiers put it. Goldman helped dump that possibility.
Morgan Stanley, another investment bank that had its own near-death experience in the fall of 2008, got a similar though much smaller benefit while also acting as adviser to the Treasury Department. The Federal Reserve provided both Goldman and Morgan Stanley with shelter from the storm by designating each as a "bank holding company," even though neither owned many retail banks. The status gave them access to emergency loans at the Fed's discount window-just in case.
JPMorgan Chase was vulnerable in a different way. It was not a counterparty holding AIG derivatives, but the Morgan bank was itself the banking industry's largest issuer of derivatives. It held $9.2 trillion in credit derivatives-four times its capital reserves-and many trillions more in other forms of derivatives. By its actions, the Fed greatly reduced the risks for the Morgan bank.
"The rescue of AIG distorted the marketplace by transforming highly risky derivative bets into fully guaranteed payment obligations," the COP explained. "The result was that the government backed up the entire derivatives market, as if these trades deserved the same taxpayer backstop as savings deposits and checking accounts."
Bankers will be bankers. But what about the Federal Reserve? The oversight panel expressed sympathy for the circumstances Fed officials faced, but drew a harsh conclusion: "By adopting the term sheet developed by the private sector consortium and retaining most of its terms and conditions, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York chose to act, in effect, as if it were a private investor in many ways, when its actions also had serious public consequences whose full extent it may not have appreciated."
That summarizes the moral confusion of the Federal Reserve. In a state of national emergency, it was acting under the business-as-usual expectations of the private financial system, while skipping lightly over the public consequences. This quality was most clearly demonstrated in the choices it did not make. The oversight report explains in detail the alternative approaches the Fed did not even explore. The central bank has insisted that none of these were pursued because they were either unworkable or prohibited. The explanations tend to be legalistic and narrowly argued in the logic of Wall Street investors.
To put it crudely, the Fed could have taken some key players in a back room and discreetly banged their heads together. Central bankers do this on occasion with uncooperative bankers. In extreme circumstances, the Fed can apply formidable powers of persuasion. Most bankers do not wish to provoke the Fed's disfavor, especially when the system is wobbly and they might need the central bank's help to survive. This time the Fed did not even try.
Timothy Geithner told panel members he does not think it is the Federal Reserve's role to use the tools at its disposal to induce the banks it regulates to do something they do not want to do. That posture implicitly gives the high ground to the regulated banks-their choice, not the government's.
Baxter, general counsel at the New York Fed, testified that the Fed did not seek to pressure banks into compromising on their contract rights. "We see that as an abuse of regulatory power," he said. Scott Alvarez, general counsel for the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, testified, "We had no legal authority to force anyone to take actions they did not want to take and at this time in this economic circumstance, they did not want to provide assistance to a struggling firm. So there was nothing more that we could do."
The oversight panel did not accept these claims of regulatory impotence. Neither do many Wall Street veterans familiar with the Fed's potential power. Given the scale of the crisis, the Fed could have decided to organize a joint public-private consortium to handle emergency lending for AIG. That inevitably pushes counterparties to make their share of concessions, like the "haircuts" creditors typically accept to settle corporate bankruptcy cases.
The Fed could not force them to accept, but it could make refusal very awkward. Any holdouts could be "named and shamed" and held up for public scorn-as bankers who accepted public bailouts but refused to do their part. There's nothing irregular about that. Such "workouts" are standard practice when major creditors have to resolve problems of indebted companies. Typically they will settle for less to avoid the enormous costs and delay of long-running bankruptcy litigation. Martin Beinenstock of the law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf testified: "A fundamental principle of workouts is shared sacrifice, especially when creditors are being made better off than they would be if AIG were left to file bankruptcy."
The alternatives described by the COP report are variations on this same theme of accountability-the equity of threatened bankers stepping up to "share the pain" alongside their public benefactors. Any of these other solutions would have been difficult and involved mind-bending legal complications. But the reality was that the largest financial players were far more vulnerable and dependent on the government than they or the Fed would acknowledge.
Instead of pumping out more billions, the central bank could have supplied short-term credit to AIG, while announcing that this was only a temporary measure to get through the storm. The Fed could then have declared it was preparing the insurance company to file for regular bankruptcy. This would put creditors on notice: they faced a long and expensive legal tangle in which they were unlikely to get everything they wanted. That would give them a strong incentive to negotiate a settlement for something less than 100 percent. As leading creditor, the Federal Reserve would have a lot of influence on the parties the bankruptcy judge helped or penalized.
This approach was roughly the strategy for bailing out General Motors. Government expended billions, but it also claimed the role as the lead player and asserted control-demanding new management and a thorough reorganization of the corporation. In this "managed bankruptcy," every GM stakeholder took a hit-the workers and shareholders, but also the creditors. Fed defenders cite legal obstacles that made the AIG case different. And the Fed was also reluctant to take control of AIG, even after it became 80 percent owner.
Citing legal inhibitions seems a strange excuse for the Federal Reserve to invoke. During the larger crisis, the central bank dispensed trillions of dollars in imaginative and unprecedented ways, often with no explicit authority. The law is deliberately vague and says the Fed can lend to virtually anyone in "exigent circumstances." The Fed itself gets to define what that vague phrase means.
The Federal Reserve proved to be a weak and unreliable regulator for the public interest, but blamed its weakness on inadequate laws. That excuse has now been taken away by the new financial-reform legislation, which gives the central bank more explicit legal authority to intervene and take control of troubled financial institutions. The Fed has always been able to do this-if it had the nerve to use its implicit powers in strong-armed ways. For longstanding reasons, it has lacked the will.
The Fed is now in the crosshairs and will be tested by future events. Officials may issue threats and warnings, but market players and the general public will remain skeptical until the central bank actually seizes an errant financial institution, disassembles its dangerous elements and shuts it down. That alone is needed to destroy the cynical assumption among investors, depositors and bankers that the unacknowledged doctrine of "too big to fail" still reigns. Taking this action would of course deliver a great shock to the financial system. That is why I doubt the Fed will do it.
The Congressional Oversight Panel did not address the new law and its potential effectiveness. What follows is my analysis, based on many years of observing the central bank during its turmoil of the past generation. The Fed is weak for many reasons, some revealed in the AIG story, but like any proud institution, it dares not speak candidly about its predicament. The political system is likewise still too intimidated to challenge the myth and mystery, but sharp questions have been raised since the financial crisis. If I am right, a stronger reform critique will be forthcoming when the Fed fails again to put its public obligations ahead of the banks.
One weakness is embedded in the institutional culture of the Fed-its chummy relations with the most powerful institutions and the moral confusion between public purpose and private returns. In some ways, these traits date back to the Federal Reserve's origins in 1913, when this hybrid government agency was created, melding public and private interests. Regulated bankers participate side by side with their regulators. The central bank's obligation to protect the "safety and soundness" of the financial system often becomes a euphemism for defending bank profitability. These qualities might conceivably be bleached away with fundamental reform of the venerable institution. Ideally, it could start with the conflicted loyalties so obvious at the powerful New York Fed.
Even in that unlikely event, the Federal Reserve will still be handicapped by the other great source of its weakness-the structural imbalance of power in which the banking giants can easily outgun their principal regulator. We saw how that happened in the AIG story when the bankers called Geithner's bluff, after which he retreated obediently.
The awkward secret, understood by savvy Fed governors, is that the central bank has been steadily weakened by the deregulation of banking and finance over the past generation. As the Fed was deprived of various control levers with which it used to discipline the banking system, private financial power accordingly became stronger-more reckless and more concentrated at the top. As the mega-banks allied themselves with unregulated hedge funds and leverage was multiplied through off-balance-sheet gimmicks, the system became more powerful yet also more fragile, a dangerous combination. Some leaks have been plugged, but not all of them. And bankers are good at finding new ones.
Savvy bankers understand what Fed officials understand-the central bankers are trapped in a game of chicken with important banks that can call their bluff. If the Fed acts in a prompt fashion to curb or punish reckless behavior before it get dangerous, the bankers will accuse it of stifling profit and progress. Bank examiners are chastened, told to back off.
If the Fed waits too long to intervene, as it regularly did during the past twenty-five years, then it may be faced with a far more dangerous situation: given the globalization of financial markets, the system now operates with a hair-trigger response to threatening rumors or disclosures. We saw it happen in the fall of 2008. A broad panic raced around the world, freezing credit markets, collapsing financial assets and bringing down major institutions.
This discreet power struggle is never candidly acknowledged by the governing institutions (who fear it would weaken them further), but it has fed the growing instability for several decades. Fed regulators have lacked the nerve (or the hard evidence) to stop dangerous practices by banks before they reach the crisis stage. Yet once calamity appears imminent, it's feared that taking action might provoke a wider disaster-a global "run" by investors-since other banks are engaged in similar behavior.
We might feel more sympathy for the Federal Reserve, except its leaders have actively contributed to their predicament. Paul Volcker, Fed chairman in the Carter and Reagan era, privately grumbled that removing ceilings on interest rates would weaken the central bank's hand, but he reluctantly supported it. His successor, Alan Greenspan, led cheers for liberating the banks from government regulation. The consequences are now fully visible.
The first "too big to fail" bailout, of Continental Illinois Bank in 1984, was supervised by Volcker in circumstances that would lead to other bailouts in later years. Volcker knew the Chicago bank was drowning in bad loans, so he demanded that the board of directors fire its go-go chairman, Roger Anderson, and start writing off the bad debt. The directors called Volcker's bluff and did the opposite. At the climax, Volcker arranged a federal rescue because he feared several other major banks were similarly vulnerable. If the Fed didn't rescue Continental, that could touch off something worse.
"Yeah, maybe we should have nailed them," Michael Bradfield, Volcker's general counsel, acknowledged afterward (reported in my book Secrets of the Temple). "What are you going to say? Goddamn it, as long as Roger Anderson is chairman of your bank, we're not going to lend any money at the discount window? You can say it and it's pretty intimidating, but the directors can call your bluff.... as a practical matter, you can't. The consequences of refusing to supply liquidity support to a bank are too severe."
In other words, the AIG case was not only about weak regulators. Geithner was weak and easily spun around by the bankers, but Volcker was a monumentally tough regulator, and he made similar decisions when his bluff was called. That comparison is my evidence for the structural causes beneath politics and personalities. Those deeper causes have not been fixed.
Lots of ordinary citizens have figured this out. If some banks are too big to fail, then government should compel them to become smaller banks. The harsh reality is that our bloated financial sector is too large for the economy it serves, its power too concentrated at the top. Neither the president nor either political party is yet ready to face the imperative of breaking up the mega-banks. Until they do, the system will remain unstable and prone to excesses, maybe worse.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve's dilemma has been made much larger. It has been given broad discretion to enforce many structural changes on the financial system. But discretion can be fatal for regulators, as AIG illustrated. It asks Fed leaders to get tough with their principal clients, when Congress didn't have the nerve to do the same. Congress needs to write hard-nosed laws with concrete prohibitions and specific enforcement triggers, not wishful requests. If the Fed again fails to act, as I fear, another crisis becomes more likely. If that occurs, the Federal Reserve will be the next big subject for reform.
William Greider is national affairs correspondent for The Nation. He is author of "Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country" and, most recently, "Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country."
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Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Why Should We Listen to Deficit Hawks?

Cover of "Plunder and Blunder: The Rise a...Cover via Amazon

Published on Tuesday, June 1, 2010 by The Guardian/UK
Why Should We Listen to Deficit Hawks?
Calls to cut social security come from economists who want to line Wall Street pockets with money from ordinary workers

by Dean Baker
When politicians demand that the public do something because of the dictates of financial markets, it is best to hold on to your wallet. Back in September of 2008, both President Bush and the Democratic leadership in Congress insisted that if we did not immediately hand over $700bn to the banks, the whole financial system would grind to a halt.

The threat worked – the banks got their $700bn from Congress and much more from the Fed – with few questions asked. As a result, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and the rest are now as profitable as ever and once again paying out record bonuses to "top performers".

If the market had been allowed to run its course Goldman, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and many other major banks would have been bankrupt, leaving their shareholders and creditors out of luck and their top executives walking the unemployment lines. There are reasons that this outcome would have been undesirable for the economy as a whole, but there is a big difference between the Tarp blank check and doing nothing. If the politicians and their accomplices in the economics profession had not overwhelmed the public with fear, we could have ensured that the bankers suffered from the crisis that they had themselves created.

With the banks back on their feet, the Wall Street crew and their accomplices in the economics profession are again feeling their oats. They are insisting that we have to put our hopes for economic recovery on the back burner. Instead, we have to focus on deficit reduction. The reason is that we have to soothe financial markets.

The claim is that if we don't act aggressively now to reduce the budget deficit then the "bond vigilantes" will start a run on US debt just as they have recently done with Greece. This is supposed to make us so scared that we will accept large cuts in social security and in other important programmes.

There are three basic problems with this argument. First, why on earth should anyone trust what the bankers' economist accomplices are telling us? These people completely missed the $8tn housing bubble; is there any reason to believe that their insight into financial markets is better today than it was two years ago?

The second reason not to follow their advice is that the financial markets themselves don't necessarily reflect the underlying reality in the economy. Are we supposed to twist ourselves into knots over whatever is fashionable in financial markets this week? Suppose we structure our policies to make the markets happy this week and then next week the Wall Street diz brains decide that something else is now fashionable? This leaves us forever chasing Wall Street fashions. That is not a sound basis for economic policy.

The third reason not to take the deficit hawks argument seriously is simply that it is bad economics. The country needs deficit spending to sustain demand until private demand recovers from the collapse of the housing bubble. This is basic logic – and the prestigious positions of many of the deficit hawks will not allow them to repeal the rules of logic.

Furthermore, the United States is not Greece, as all serious people know. It has a huge economy that is still largely self-sufficient (imports are only 16% of GDP). The idea that the United States is about to experience a run on its debt is absurd on its face. The Fed can and should buy the debt, if necessary. Let's hear the deficit hawks say this will cause inflation. With very few exceptions, they won't dare make such an assertion because they know it is not true.

The deficit hawks are not concerned about national insolvency; they are not worried about soaring inflation; they are worried about how to take every last penny from ordinary workers and give it to the Wall Street crew. That is what the Tarp was about and this is what the latest crusade to reduce the deficit is all about. Now they want to go after workers' social security because, as Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke said: "That is where the money is." The fact that workers have paid for these benefits doesn't matter at all to the Wall Street crew.

So, if you feel like giving all your money to the Wall Street gang, then you should take the deficit hawks seriously. But, if you think that people who are not Wall Street millionaires have rights too, then get out the pitchforks and send the deficit hawks and their economist accomplices running.
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer ( www.conservativenannystate.org) and the more recently published Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of The Bubble Economy. He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues. You can find it at the American Prospect's web site.
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Thursday, April 29, 2010

Elizabeth Warren Pushes Wall Sreet Reform

Elizabeth WarrenImage by New America Foundation via Flickr


Shahien Nasiripour
shahien@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting




Wall Street Reform: Elizabeth Warren Challenges Republicans To Stand Up For Families


It's time for senators -- especially the Republicans -- to square their upcoming votes on financial reform with their long-professed desire to protect families, said consumer advocate and federal bailout watchdog Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday in an interview with the Huffington Post.

"Everyone in Washington claims to be on the side of families and to support reform," said Warren, a member of the 2010 TIME 100 list of the world's most influential people. "But the test is who votes to paper over problems with another regulatory system designed to fail and who votes for real Wall Street accountability even if it means that some donors will be disappointed.

"I'm tired of hearing politicians claim to support families and, at the same time, vote with the big banks on the most important financial reform package in generations. I'm deep-down tired of it."

Of all the proposals in the 1,400-page Senate bill attempting to reform Wall Street and protect American consumers, none is more contentious than the one calling for the creation of a consumer-focused agency dedicated to protecting borrowers from abusive lenders.

Reform-minded Democrats want a powerful independent entity able to defend powerless families from the banks and financial firms that squeeze profits out of customers through tricks, traps and outright predatory loans.

Moderates want to say that they voted for a bill that protects consumers -- even if it really doesn't.

Republicans profess a desire to protect consumers, acknowledging regulators' past failures, but they also don't want to stem the flow of credit or needlessly harm lenders' ability to make a buck.
Story continues below

The Senate bill, authored by the banking committee's chairman, Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, calls for a consumer entity to be housed inside the Federal Reserve. It largely, though, adheres to Warren's four tests: a chief appointed by the president, an independent source of funding, the authority to write consumer rules and the ability to enforce them against unscrupulous lenders. The unit, thus, focuses squarely on consumers. Ensuring banks' profitability is left to banking regulators.

The Republicans' counter-proposal, released this week, fails all four of Warren's tests.

It calls for a council led by the heads of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Federal Reserve. They'd issue rules, supervise "our nation's largest financial institutions, large non-bank mortgage originators, and other financial services providers who have violated the consumer protection statutes," and enforce the rules.

Warren isn't thrilled with the idea of allowing bank regulators -- whose top priority is to ensure the profitability of the nation's banks -- to continue to oversee consumer protection, particularly when the OCC is involved.

"The problem with consumer protection is structure. Our current consumer regulatory process is designed to fail, and if we don't fix it, it will fail again," she said. "In every major dispute between customers and banks, the OCC entered the fray on the side of the banks. Clearly, banks -- not their customers -- were the OCC's primary interest. The idea that the OCC would now be in a position to veto the new consumer agency is shameful.

"If our goal was to take any lessons from the crisis, we would do the reverse: Let's give a consumer regulator a veto over the OCC," Warren added. After all, "it wasn't a consumer regulator who presided over the biggest financial meltdown in generations."

She didn't hold back in singling out the GOP's plan, which the Harvard Law professor and bankruptcy expert said was "pure genius -- for the banks who want to keep running things."

"The substitute language on consumer protection is designed to paper over very real structural problems with a new system that is designed to fail as much as the status quo is," Warren said. "The whole idea of the substitute is to take a bunch of regulators that already failed and throw them in a committee together."

Asked if she thought Republicans such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Richard Shelby of Alabama are trying to protect families from predatory lenders, Warren let loose.

"It isn't possible to protect families and at the same time to paper over the sorts of problems that led to the crisis with just another system that is designed to fail," she said of the duo leading the GOP effort against the consumer agency. "The time has come for choosing."

With Republicans abandoning their effort to prevent Dodd's bill from being considered on the Senate floor (the bill passed a procedural hurdle on Wednesday), senators will soon begin offering and debating amendments.

Shelby hopes to weaken the consumer agency.

"This bill still contains a sprawling new consumer protection bureau that will find and force its way into facets of our economy that had nothing to do with the housing crisis," he said in a Wednesday statement. "This massive new bureaucracy would have unchecked authority to regulate whatever it wants, whenever it wants, however it wants. I am aware of no other arm of the federal government this powerful, yet so unaccountable."

On Tuesday, Shelby told reporters that the agency was "the biggest obstacle" keeping Democrats and Republicans from reaching a deal.

McConnell also has attacked the agency, as has Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

To dilute the agency's power, Shelby and others will push proposals to give bank regulators more authority to rein it in, like replacing it altogether or giving bank regulators stronger veto authority.

The GOP proposal, for example, calls for the Fed chairman, currently Ben Bernanke, to be one of three leaders atop the consumer council.

"Can someone please ask Ben Bernanke if he actually wants to spend his time serving on that committee?" Warren asked. "How much time does he plan to carve out of his day to think about kickbacks on car loans or payday rollovers?

"Let's give those issues to people who have the time and expertise to deal with them," she added.

Sources who have been in meetings with Bernanke and have heard him discuss these issues privately say it's "very hard to believe that he has any real interest" serving on a consumer council like the one envisioned by the GOP.

Another way Republicans and bank-friendly Democrats will try to weaken the bill's consumer protection provisions is by repealing the portion of the bill that attempts to give states more power in going after big banks that violate consumers. At present, states are largely unable to thanks to an aggressive legal campaign over the past decade by the OCC.

National banks like Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citibank argue that it's too difficult and costly to comply with different consumer protection regimes in 50 states, so they need a national standard. The OCC agrees, and also touts the legal precedent set by numerous U.S. Supreme Court decisions interpreting the National Bank Act, the 19th-century law that forms the basis of the nation's banking system.

States and consumer advocates say the OCC protects big banks at the expense of consumers. State officials argue that the OCC essentially allows for consumers to be preyed upon and defrauded. The OCC vigorously denies the accusations.

Warren points out, though, that other industries don't get the special treatment afforded to national banks. In his proposal last summer, President Obama said the bill should end the OCC practice, known as preemption.

"Walmart operates in all 50 states, and it doesn't come to Washington demanding that Congress protect it from state laws that demand workplace safety or environmental standards or anything else," she said.

"Every other industry views compliance with state laws as a minor administrative cost of doing business. The big banks aren't worried about the difficulty of following local laws -- they have lawyers and computers to figure it out. Besides, thousands of little banks do it every day," she added.

In the House, bank-friendly Democrats led by Melissa Bean of Illinois watered down what was initially a strong provision that effectively neutered the OCC's authority to preempt state laws on everything from capping ATM fees to reducing overdraft charges and banning abusive home mortgage loans.

The bill now essentially resembles the status quo. Bean touts her vote on the House bill, which passed in December, as one for reform. So do the other legislators who voted against giving states more authority to crack down on abusive lenders, yet ultimately voted for the bill.

"There were others that thought they could get away with voting for the overall reform package while doing everything they could behind the scenes to hold water for the big banks and earn all those campaign contributions," Warren said. "We're about to find out if any senators want to play those games."

She hopes to find out soon.

"Every day that goes by without a clear set of rules in place to guide our economy into the future is a day that costs us money," she said. "Every credit card, payday loan, car loan and check overdraft that hides another fee or another bizarre interest calculation in the fine print costs American families. Every Too Big to Fail that takes on a little more risk, or leverages up just a little more, or that sucks capital away from another business that doesn't have a government guarantee at no charge costs American families. Every lousy product sold to a family, to a retirement fund, or to a local township costs American families.

"We cannot rebuild a strong and reliable economy without new rules," she continued. "We need those rules now. Not next month, not in six months, not in a year. Now."
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Thursday, April 8, 2010

Failure of Too Big To Fail Banks Hurts Reform

Ben Bernanke (lower-right), Chairman of the Fe...Image via Wikipedia

Published on Wednesday, April 7, 2010 by The Guardian/UK
Why We Must Break Up the Banks
Paul Krugman says it isn't necessary – but breaking up financial giants would at least give us hope that things can change

by Dean Baker

It's not often that I disagree with Paul Krugman, but there are occasions where at least one of us is wrong. And the treatment of too big to fail (TBTF) banks is one of them.

Krugman argued in a column last week that breaking up the TBTF banks is not a necessary part of financial reform. Krugman pointed to the example of Canada as a country with a well-regulated financial system. Canada did not experience a financial crisis in 2008 in spite of the fact that five big banks essentially account for the whole of the Canadian banking system. On the other side, Krugman noted that the collapse of large numbers of small banks can also create a crisis, pointing to the chain of bank collapses at the start of the Great Depression.

These are valid points, but to paraphrase Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz: "we're not in Canada anymore." While Canadian banking regulation appears to have been effective thus far (we may want to see how they cope with a yet to deflate housing bubble before pronouncing it a success), Canada is a very different country from the United States. In Canada, they have had universal Medicare for 40 years. As the first President Bush used to say, it is a kinder, gentler, country.

This matters for financial regulation, because there is a level of independence and integrity on the part of the regulators in Canada that does not exist in the United States. The line in Washington is that if you want to talk to someone from Goldman Sachs, call the treasury department.

The close connection between the industry and the regulators matters because regulation will always require judgment calls. It also matters because regulation means limiting bank profits. The regulations are by definition about preventing banks from carrying on lines of business that are profitable.

Going back to the last crisis, our regulators should have cracked down on the junk mortgages that were being issued by the millions to buy homes at bubble-inflated prices. But this would have meant clamping down on banks that were making huge profits issuing the loans. It also would have meant clamping down on the investment banks that were making huge profits packaging them into securities and selling these securities all over the world.

To take an even more extreme case, the recent analysis of the Lehman bankruptcy showed that New York Federal Reserve Bank helped to hide Lehman's insolvency for months. It accepted Lehman's junk as collateral for short-term loans. This was a direct violation of the Fed's charter, which only allows it to accept investment grade assets as collateral, a definition that clearly did not include Lehman's "Repo 105s".

In these cases, our regulators instead used their judgment to decide that everything was just fine and looked the other way. Remarkably, no regulator was fired for these astounding failures in judgment. In fact, there was probably not even a single regulator who missed a promotion.

In the United States it will always be easy for regulators to look the other way, even when the ultimate consequences prove to be disastrous. By contrast, cracking down on politically connected banks is difficult for regulators. The banks' executives will call their friends in the administration and Congress to complain about the crazy regulator who is trying to keep them from running their business.

And, you can be sure that the banks will have a story. They pay smart people lots of money to develop those stories. The banks' mouthpieces will make a conscientious regulator look like a crazed vigilante who just doesn't understand modern finance. Just ask Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission who was stopped in her effort to regulate credit default swaps back in 1998.

Krugman is right that breaking up the banks does not guarantee good regulation. In addition to his Great Depression example, we also have the savings and loan disaster of the 80s. The S&Ls were overwhelmingly small institutions with even the largest being far below any conceivable TBTF threshold.

However, a break-up of the big banks will at least give the country some hope that things can change. As it stands now, the big banks are back on their feet, and in some cases more profitable than ever, feasting on the now explicit government guarantee of support in the event of a crisis. By my calculations, this guarantee could be worth as much as $34bn a year, more than one-third of the gross cost of the healthcare bill.

There are many aspects of regulatory reform that involve technical issues that the public will not follow. If we have to say what is different the day after financial reform is passed, rules on leverage limits and exchange-traded derivatives will not mean much, especially if they are enforced by people who accept Repo 105s as investment grade collateral.

If we break up Citigroup, Goldman, JP Morgan and the other giants, then we will know that something has changed. This break-up, along with a financial transactions tax, will lead to a qualitatively different financial industry.
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research

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Friday, March 5, 2010

Bill Black’s Top Ten Ways to Crack Down on Corporate Financial Crime

Organization of the Federal Reserve SystemImage via Wikipedia

Published on Friday, March 5, 2010 by Corporate Crime Reporter
Bill Black’s Top Ten Ways to Crack Down on Corporate Financial Crime

by Corporate Crime Reporter

Ninety-five percent of criminologists study blue collar crime.

Five percent study white collar crime.

Of the tiny minority who study white collar crime, ninety five percent focus on the individuals who rip off the corporation.

We are left with a small handful of criminologists – think Edwin Sutherland, John Braithwaite, Gil Geis – who have studied or are studying – corporate crime.

That would be crime by the corporation.

Bill Black is one of the most prominent of those living corporate criminologists.

His specialty – control fraud.

Control fraud is when the CEO of a company uses the corporation as a weapon to commit fraud.

Bill Black is a lawyer and former federal bank regulator.

He’s the author of the corporate crime classic – The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry (University of Texas Press, 2005.)

Black says there are steps we can take as a society to control corporate crime – in particular financial crime.

In an interview with Corporate Crime Reporter last week, Black laid out his top ten.

Number ten: Hire 1,000 FBI agents.

Pass legislation (HR 3995) introduced by Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur that would fund the hiring of 1,000 FBI agents to investigate white collar crime.

Number nine: Appoint a chief criminologist at each of the financial regulatory agencies.

“Each agency needs someone who understands white collar crime,” Black said. “If you don’t understand fraud schemes, if you don’t understand how accounting is used to run these scams, you will always have a disaster in the making.”

Number eight: Fix executive compensation.

Black would tie executive bonuses to long term corporate performance.

Number seven: Target the top 100 corporate criminals.

“We need to do a top 100 priority list – the way it was done in the savings and loan crisis,” Black said. “The FBI, the Justice Department and the regulatory agencies got together and put together a list of top 100 companies to target. There was a recognition that these were control frauds. The top executives were using seemingly legitimate savings and loans as their weapons of fraud. And that is why any serious look will tell you the same thing about this most recent crisis as well. The criminal justice referral process has collapsed at the agencies.”

Number six: Regulate first.

“When you desupervise or deregulate an industry, in fact you are decriminalizing control fraud. The regulators are the ones who make the bulk of these cases. I’m not saying they can do it alone. In the current crisis, the FBI had no meaningful support from the regulators. You have regulators denying they were regulators and saying that there could be no fraud because the rating agencies were handing out high ratings. That kind of naivete is ideologically driven. You will not have effective prosecution with that kind of regulatory regime.”

Number five: Bust up the FBI partnership with the Mortgage Bankers Association.

“Now we have the FBI standing with what it calls its partners – the Mortgage Bankers Association,” Black said. “But the Mortgage Bankers Association – that’s the trade association of the perps. So, the FBI is partnering with the perps.”

“The result is – we have seen zero prosecutions of the specialty non-prime lenders that caused the crisis,” Black said. “The mortgage bankers are going to position themselves as the victims. This has been so successful that the FBI now has a mantra. They are saying there are two kinds of mortgage fraud. Fraud for profit and fraud for housing. And neither of them is control fraud. They have effectively said – control fraud is impossible. Even though it was the entire story behind the savings and loan crisis, the Enron wave, and the creation of the most recent housing bubble.”

Number four: Get rid of Ben Bernanke as chair of the Fed. Replace him with Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz.

“Ben Bernanke should not have been reappointed as head of the Fed,” Black said. “He was the most senior regulator. And he was an utter failure. Under President Bush, he was President of the Council of Economic Advisors. So, he was a failure as a regulator. And he was a failure as an economist.”

Number three: Get rid of too big to fail.

There are about 20 banks that have assets of $100 billion or more. They are considered too big to fail. “You do three things,” Black says. “First, you stop them from growing. Second, you shrink them (to below $20 billion in assets.) You create the tax and regulatory incentives where they have to shrink below the level where they pose a systemic risk. And third, you regulate them much more intensively while they are in the process of moving from a systemically dangerous institution to a more leaner, smaller, more efficient, less dangerous institution.”

Number two: Create a consumer financial protection agency headed by Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren.

“The sine qua non for success as a regulator is independence,” Black says. “So, it’s a very bad sign that Congress is moving away from an independent regulator.”

“As we speak, news is breaking that they are moving away from housing the regulator at the Treasury Department. Now they are talking about putting it at the Federal Reserve. The Fed is an independent regulator. Unfortunately, it’s an independent anti-regulator. I called putting it at the Treasury a sick joke. Putting it at the Fed is also a sick joke. They are both recipes for failure.”

Number one: Fire Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Office of Thrift Supervision chief John Bowman, Fed chief regulator Patrick Parkinson, and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency Chief John Dugan.

“Tim Geithner was testifying before Congress a couple of years ago,” Black said. “And in response to a question from Ron Paul (R-Texas), Geithner said – ‘I have to stop you right there – I’ve never been a regulator.’ Well, that’s true. But you are not supposed to admit it.”

“Can you imagine. This is the President of the New York Fed, testifying about the greatest failure in banking in the history of the nation. And he is so completely out of it – the mindset of capture is so complete, that he says – I’ve never been a regulator. This is the ultimate capture. You don’t even think of yourself as a regulator.”
“Ben Bernanke in October 2009 appointed Patrick Parkinson as the top supervisor at the Fed,” Black said. “He’s the guy who, under Alan Greenspan, led the Fed charge against Brooksley Born when she wanted to regulate credit default swaps.”

“Patrick Parkinson, on behalf of the Fed, testified that credit default swaps should be left completely deregulated.”

“The reasons? If we regulate them, they will flee to the city of London. We should be so lucky, of course.”

“And two, fraud can’t happen in credit default swaps, because the participants are so sophisticated. This is the most astonishingly naive model of white collar crime by people who know nothing about white collar crime and don’t study it at all.”

“John Dugan’s sole priority and all of his passion as OCC director has been pre-empting state efforts to protect us from predatory lenders,” Black said.
“And John Bowman should be fired,” Black said. “The OTS got in bed with the industry most openly.”
© 2010 Corporate Crime Reporter
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