Behold the power of finance capital. Despite shitting the bed and making us all clean it up, Wall Street will remain essentially the same as the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) caved to the banksters and will continue to allow a cartel to control the derivatives market. Under pressure from Wall Street lobbyists, federal regulators [...]

Standard & Poors, one of the major credit rating agencies, has done an interesting pivot in defining itself amidst a Justice Department civil suit. Like all the major rating agencies S&P is paid by those whose securities it rates.  This, quite obviously, is a conflict of interest in how it rates securities because if it [...]

This seems like a great time for banks to start loosening their lending standards. After all, household balance sheets are strengthening, and with mortgage rates so low, they can better afford the loans. Oh wait, you’re not talking about banks loosening their lending standards to individual homeowners? Only to corporations? Never mind. Regulators are concerned [...]

Having failed to stop Elizabeth Warren from reaching the US Senate, Wall Street interests are now clearly trying to push her away from the committee assignment where she would have the greatest oversight capability over them. Politico’s Morning Money, which is basically just a giant quote laundering program for lobbyists and operatives, has this item [...]

This will get approximately no attention today, but a federal court in Australia ruled that Standard and Poor’s, the credit rating agency, lied to investors when they awarded their highest, triple-A rating to derivative securities that lost their value within two years of purchase. The court ruled for a series of local councils in Australia, [...]

Before last night’s debate, Jeff Connaughton, former chief of staff to Senator Ted Kaufman and longtime aide to Joe Biden and President Clinton, offered some advice to Mitt Romney. He thought Romney should go after Barack Obama’s biggest weakness: the failure to prosecute Wall Street crimes. In actuality, Romney only submitted a glancing blow with [...]

The above chart has generated some attention. Rather than compare the current unemployment trajectory to previous postwar recessions, as Bill McBride at Calculated Risk has consistently done with “the scariest chart ever,” Josh Lerner uses the Reinhart-Rogoff analysis of financial crises to generate a new chart, comparing the unemployment rate to those from other incidents [...]

I concur with Felix Salmon on this, we’re all associating the Libor scandal with Barclays Bank because they happen to be the ones who cooperated with the investigation first. In fact, pretty much every bank that determines the Libor – and there are 16 of them -stands accused of fixing the rates in one way [...]

Apparently the Fed didn’t take kindly to that Bloomberg News investigation of their $7.7 trillion largesse to domestic and foreign banks during the financial crisis. The Fed took the rare step of publishing a public document, with a cover letter by Ben Bernanke, objecting to the report. Recent articles “have made repeated claims that the [...]

One insidious claim I’ve been trying to fight for the past couple years is this notion that TARP worked, and that the bailouts were unpalatable but necessary. The problem here is that people conflate “TARP” and “the bailouts” in unhelpful ways. If TARP worked at anything, it worked to put Congress on the hook for [...]

Tim Geithner went on CNBC today and said that the Administration is getting right on the whole “prosecuting the people who defrauded the economy” thing. Asked on CNBC about the Occupy Wall Street movement’s frustrations over the lack of criminal charges related to the financial crisis, Geithner said action is on the way. “You’ve seen [...]