happy 1st birthday, dodd-frank, part i

July 20, 2011
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People are talking. And, they are not being kind.  Word is, a year has passed, and Dodd-Frank is not living up to his potential.  This observation is painful, but true. Yet, we should not blame the birthday boy.  Here’s why. We expect him to be a doctor already, curing the bloated banking disease and immunizing…

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so long, sheila bair

July 8, 2011
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Sheila Bair’s five-year term as Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) ends today, Friday, July 8th. During her tenure, Bair racked up an impressive list of achievements. Notably, even with the recent wave of bank failures, Bair managed to use only the industry-supplied deposit insurance fund (DIF), and not taxpayer dollars to shut…

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deceptive by design: derivatives as secret liens

June 8, 2011
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Secretive practices and institutions are common in contemporary finance. For those who’ve ceased the search for long-term value creation, temporary information advantage is key. Even commonplace practices can be reinterpreted as havens of hiddenness. My colleague Michael Simkovic’s article “Secret Liens and the Financial Crisis of 2008” exposes the role of derivatives and securitization as…

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humans bite dog

June 6, 2011
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what network science has to say about large universal banks

May 31, 2011
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A few days after he made the fateful acquisition of Golden West, Ken Thompson, then CEO of Wachovia Corporation exuberantly celebrated the universal bank model that had emerged in the United States in the wake of the repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act: [T]here is great value in the universal bank model for both customers…

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political circus on the cfpb and elizabeth warren

May 10, 2011
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One might be forgiven for believing that the Republicans have a death wish. No longer able to run on a credible national security platform, they appear to be positioning themselves on another four losing propositions: * refusing to lift the debt ceiling, even though business leaders as prominent as Jamie Dimon have deplored the irresponsibility…

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bipartisan senate panel report slams banks and bureaucrats: “please sir, i want some more”

April 15, 2011
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William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell came to mind, late Wednesday night as I waded through “Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse.” That is, the freshly-released bipartisan report from the Senate’s Permanent Subcommitee on Investigations. The Levin-Coburn Report, named for Subcommittee Chairman, Carl Levin (D-MI) and Ranking Minority…

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asleep at the switch

April 14, 2011
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This morning the Federal Aviation Authority’s head of air traffic control, Mr Hank Krakowski, resigned. He was taking responsibility for the recent incidents in which air traffic controllers were found to have been asleep on the job. The FAA Administrator has clearly decided that if Mr Krakowski did not go then he would likely be…

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