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April 20, 2013
WSJ-MarketWatch: How Thatcher would have fixed the financial crisis She ignored conventional wisdom, acted on her beliefs UK Telegraph: The IMF is flunking the financial crisis By turning its fire on Britain, the IMF gives the impression it is out of ideas and solutions Financial Times: Wake up to the #Twitter effect on markets Investors need to spend more time thinking about the way social media can affect financial markets Reuters: New regulations require cleaner data Continuing efforts by financial regulators and by firms themselves to monitor and offset risk have affected almost all areas of firms’ operations, including the management and maintenance of data. The overhaul of global systems following the financial crisis has led to an audit of data, and specifically of the information which firms hold about themselves and their counterparties or clients, known as business entity reference data. Heritage: Eight Steps to Eliminate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—Permanently It is time to close both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the government-sponsored mortgage giants. Both entities distort the country’s housing finance market by issuing mortgage-backed securities with subsidized government guarantees that the mortgages will be repaid. If guarantees are necessary, they should be priced and issued by the private sector, not by the state. Financial institutions expert David C. John details specific steps to achieve this shutdown carefully and methodically without further upsetting the delicate housing market—and without making the situation worse. Heritage: Promoting Economic Freedom Key to Realizing World Bank’s Mission
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April 12, 2013
Forbes: Margaret Thatcher Exposed The Infantile Illusions Of Socialism Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies, we are often told, were cruel, harsh, immoral. In fact she was a deeply moral thinker, and the moral superiority of the free market was central to her thinking. She made the case for it like no other major political leader. Washington Post: Is easy money creating a new wave of bubbles? Trillions of new dollars, euros, yen and pounds are sloshing around the global financial system, a result of extraordinary efforts by the leading central banks over the last several years to try to yank their economies out of their long slump. And it has to go somewhere. Will that somewhere wind up being a new set of financial bubbles that pop and send us back where we started? RealClearMarkets: President Obama Trumpets 'Financial Capability' While Undermining It The President proclaimed April to be National Financial Capability Month, a new twist on what used to be called financial literacy month. Who can argue with wanting to make sure that people have "access to the information and tools that empower them to operate safely and smartly in the marketplace"? The strategy being employed to achieve this objective is the problem. WSJ-MarketWatch: Getting used to a slow-growth future Irrational exuberance is back. I know, I know. The Dow Jones Industrial Average just rose to yet another record close. Call it irrational, but exuberance is being handsomely rewarded in this market. Bloomberg: Bitcoin Really Is an Existential Threat to the Modern Liberal State So far, Bitcoin is not a big deal. Its total value in circulation was $1.4 billion as of this week. That's equivalent to the currency stock of a small nation -- somewhere between Iceland and Uruguay -- and just one-thousandth of the total value of U.S. dollars in circulation. Heritage: Breaking Up Big Banks: Right Question, Wrong Answer Should the federal government break up America’s big banks? Once confined to the populist fringes of policy debate, the idea has developed surprising momentum in recent months, with a number of conservative voices jumping on the bank breakup bandwagon Huffington Post: ‘Break Up the Banks’ Bill Gains Steam in Senate as Wall Street Lobbyists Cry Foul Momentum to break up the nation’s largest banks is building quickly on Capitol Hill, just weeks after a unanimous, symbolic vote in the Senate to end taxpayer subsidies to Wall Street. AEI: Unfounded Optimism: The Danger of FHA’s Mispriced Unemployment Risk News from the housing market is finally positive: house prices are rising and the share of seriously delinquent loans is down. One major exception? FHA-guaranteed mortgages.
Posted by
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April 01, 2013
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FHA Government backing for the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) gives it competitive advantages over private sector mortgage insurers, driving them out of the marketplace and leaving homebuyers with fewer choices, witnesses told the Financial Services Subcommittee on Housing and Insurance. Wednesday’s hearing was the third in a series the Financial Services Committee is holding this year to examine the nation’s housing finance system. Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) announced in January that the hearings will focus specifically on the financially troubled FHA and the need to create a sustainable and competitive housing finance system. “Too Big to Fail” Nearly three years after enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act, two powerful regulators created under the law are not fulfilling their missions and operate far from the public’s eye, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report reviewed at a Financial Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee hearing. Thursday’s hearing was the first in what will be an ongoing series of hearings this year that will examine Dodd-Frank, which enshrined “too big to fail” into law. Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee he was “concerned” that prosecuting large financial firms would have a negative impact on the national economy. Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) and Subcommittee Chairman McHenry sent a letter to Attorney General Holder and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew asking for documents and information the Obama Administration is relying on to determine which financial institutions it believes are “too big to fail” and, thus, “too big to jail.” |
Last week Chairman Hensarling and Oversight & Investigations Subcommittee Chairman McHenry sent a letter to Attorney General Holder and Treasury Secretary Lew seeking any and all documents related to the consideration of economic factors in the decision to prosecute large banks for financial crimes. The committee's investigation comes out of Mr. Holder's recent comments at a Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing in which the Attorney General suggested some large financial instutitions are now "too big to jail."
Read the letter to Holder and Lew.
While the court ruled only on the NLRB appointments, Richard Cordray, the President's nominee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), was appointed at the same time and in the same manner as the unconstitutional NLRB appointees. Chairman Hensarling anticipates that a federal court will soon reach a similar conclusion with respect to the validity of Mr. Cordray's appointment.
Given that the Dodd-Frank Act authorizes the Federal Reserve to fund CFPB only at the request of the CFPB's director, the circumstances under which funds were transfered from the Federal Reserve to the CFPB must be called into question.
Read Chairman Hensarling's letter to Chairman Bernanke questioning the circumstances under which the Federal Reserve may lawfully fund the CFPB's operations.
“We talked about cash on balance sheets not deployed…People just sitting on cash because interest rates are too low and returns are too low now, but they think that they will go up in the future. So, everyone just sits until the Fed takes action. Rather than trying to read the market, they are trying to read what the Fed is going to do - which is very distorting in my view.” – Monetary Policy Subcommittee Chairman John Campbell "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are the essence of crony capitalism, and if we recreate them in some form or fashion, as so many in the industry and across the aisle are recommending, we are doomed to repeat the same terrible outcomes that our nation has experienced over the last four years.” – Capital Markets Subcommittee Chairman Scott Garrett
On Tuesday, the Monetary Policy and Trade Subcommittee heard testimony from a panel of four leading economists on the short-term and long-term impacts of the Federal Reserve’s unconventional monetary policy. Members of the Subcommittee asked for an objective analysis of the Fed’s monetary stimulus efforts and the results, which – judging by the state of our slow, weak recovery – are meager at best. There was a strong consensus that America would be better served by a Federal Reserve that utilizes a rules-based policy rather than an improvisational approach.
The Capital Markets and Government Sponsored Enterprises Subcommittee on Wednesday focused on the role Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played in the housing bubble and financial crisis. The Subcommittee’s hearing showed that both Fannie and Freddie were instrumental in the creation of the subprime and Alt-A mortgage market. While the Dodd-Frank Act addressed many of the symptoms of the financial crisis, it failed to address the central cause of the crisis. The taxpayer bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is the biggest bailout in history.
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