Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird came to mind Friday while watching bankers and regulators testify before the Senator Levin-lead bipartisan subcommittee hearing on “JPMorgan Chase Whale Trades: A Case History of Derivatives Risks and Abuses.” I was prepared to take notes and tweet (no pun intended), having carefully reviewed the subcommittee’s…
Teaching and research distractions have again kept me from blogging for a while. I guess my defense is that learning the facts is always an important precursor to writing about them. This morning, however, I decided to divert from class preparation to add my praise for what is surely destined to be the BOOK OF…
Andy Haldane’s speech at Jackson Hole today, The Dog and the Frisbee, is the single best speech by a regulator or financier anywhere in 2012. It is a splendid application of complexity science to the field of financial regulation. It is a succinct analysis of why “more begets more,” why big finance is leading us…
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…
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…
Last week, I began musing here, about mining the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report to confront the top ten urban myths about the Financial Crisis. Expecting to dash off a blog series in a day or so, I found that my eyes were bigger than my brain capacity. Though I had read a good portion of…
After reading much of the final report identifying the causes of the Financial Crisis in the United States, released last Thursday December 27, by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, I have one suggestion. But before I get to it, allow me to explain. Awe-inspiring labor and thought went into this document including interviews with 700…
Today the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission released its long-awaited report ( The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Financial Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States). The Report of the ten-member, bipartisan Commission, consists of the official report adopted by a majority (six) of the commissioners,…
On Wednesday, October 3, the day after the midterm elections, I spoke with Nancy Marshall Genzer of Marketplace Radio. Nancy asked me what impact the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives might have on the financial reform process. Given that only two short quotes of mine appear in the final broadcast, I am…
Last Wednesday, July 21, 2010, eighteen months after taking office, President Barack Obama used eleven pens to sign into law the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. In the tradition of many Presidents before him, Obama made use of multiple pens. He did so to create historic artifacts – or souvenirs…
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