In news that is not surprising to anyone with a firing neuron in their brain, a report by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) finds that the incestuous nature of the SEC-Wall Street relationship caused reform efforts in the money market fund industry to fail. Former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission staffers who now work [...]

Yesterday President Obama nominated Mary Jo White to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. The administration and establishment media highlighted White’s experience as a prosecutor and hinted at the possibility of a more aggressive SEC. But now that there has been time to digest the nomination there seems to be some familiar problems. Mary Jo [...]

Step right up and Spin the Revolving Door – and what is your prize? Why, a nice job on Wall Street working for the people you used to regulate – you wrote in the loopholes, now you get the cash for exploiting them! Latest contestants – staffers working for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). [...]

In case you were wondering what all those retiring and defeated lawmakers do with themselves once banished from Capitol Hill, I have a simple answer for you: they get paid. Take Tony Blair, the former British prime minister. In September, Mr. Blair was called to Claridge’s hotel in London to mediate a renegotiation of the [...]

Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-TX), who chairs the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in the House Financial Services committee, writes up a hatchet job on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in today’s Wall Street Journal. He’s really concerned about the CFPB’s salary structure: Pursuant to the Dodd-Frank Act, the bureau’s director may set and adjust [...]

Tim Pawlenty, whose previous experience with Wall Street consisted mainly of telling them to “get their snouts out of the trough,” has taken a job as the head of the Financial Services Roundtable, one of the main trade groups for Wall Street. The Roundtable is one of a handful of Washington groups, including the American [...]

Today in “Don’t Mindlessly Parrot Every Yahoo With a Contrarian Academic Study,” we have this effort, written up approvingly in the New York Times, suggesting that the revolving door is actually helpful to efforts by the SEC: The study, by researchers at Emory University, Rutgers, the University of Washington and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, [...]

So here’s me and William Cohan on yesterday’s The Alyona Show talking about that Jamie Dimon testimony yesterday. I have to admit a little shock at the focus of the coverage on the captured Congress and the relative soft pitches lobbed in Dimon’s direction. I’m wondering what people expected. This wasn’t the Senate Permanent Subcommittee [...]

Federal regulators maintained at a Senate Banking Committee hearing yesterday that investigations against JPMorgan Chase were ongoing, but that several factors, especially the funding of their agencies, would hamper their efforts. This was the first confirmation by the heads of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler and Mary [...]

Given my position as a BIG-TIME fifth-tier media gadfly, I am often a recipient of that bane of the existence of this profession, the emailed press release. Hundreds of them pass through my inbox in an average week, most of them too trivial to merit comment. But I did notice this one from the Obama [...]

The London Independent comes out with the largest estimate I’ve seen of losses on JPMorgan’s Fail Whale trades: $7 billion. The crisis at JP Morgan escalated yesterday as it emerged its trading losses in London could rise to as much as $7bn (£4.5bn) and the US bank cancelled a share buyback. Fears were growing that [...]