Bogle: Boost taxes on Wall Street 'gamblers' John Bogle counted himself among the 1% of wealthiest Americans a couple decades ago.
You might not guess that today, when you hear the 82-year-old founder of mutual fund company Vanguard rail against economic inequality. He can sound almost like an Occupy Wall Street protester: "Our markets have gone crazy, and there is 200 times as much speculation as there is investing," he says. Bill Black: Green Slime Drives Our Financial Crises. By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives. “Pink slime” just had its fifteen minutes of fame. Janet Tavakoli On The "Biggest Fraud In The History Of Capital Markets" "Inside Job" Director Charles Ferguson: Wall Street Has Turned US Into a "Predatory Nation" How to Prevent Other Financial Crises. Excessive risk-taking by banks: A new eReport. Risk-taking by banks played a critical role in the global crisis and Eurozone crisis.
Too Big to Stop: Why Big Banks Keep Getting Away With Breaking the Law - James Kwak - Business. For the country's biggest financial institutions, it's still worth it to break the law, because the government has no way to make the banks pay for acting illegally Reuters Move along, nothing to see here.
That's been the Wall Street line on the financial crisis and the calamitous behavior that caused it, and that strategy has been spectacularly successful. Since Spring 2010, financial institutions' predatory practices have fallen off the front pages of newspapers, replaced by manufactured fears of over-regulation and -- thanks to an assist from the European continent -- an Orwellian belief that government debt lies at the root of our economic problems. The issue in the Goldman case was whether the bank properly disclosed that John Paulson, a hedge fund manager, was involved in the selection of securities for the deal, because he wanted to bet against them.
Andrew Haldane · The Doom Loop: Equity and Banking · LRB 23 February 2012. In 1989, the CEOs of the seven largest banks in the US earned an average of $2.8 million, almost a hundred times the annual income of the average US household.
In the same year, the CEOs of the largest four UK banks earned £453,000, fifty times average UK household income. These are striking inequalities. Quelle Surprise! Taxpayers Will Be Paying for Part of Mortgage Settlement. Repairing the Damage of “Fraud as a Business Model” "Too Big to Jail" by Simon Johnson. Exit from comment view mode.
Click to hide this space. "Fraud As a Business Model" There were many factors that contributed to our recent financial bubble: deregulation, cheap money from the Fed, failure to enforce remaining regulations, crony capitalism, hubris, speculation, leverage, and fraud among other problems.
While fraud wasn't the only issue, it was and is a significant contributor to the credit bubble. Restraining fraud is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a sound financial system. Why No Financial Crisis Prosecutions? Ex-Justice Official Says It’s Just too Hard. It’s an issue we and others [1] have noted again [2] and again [3]: Years after the financial crisis, there have still been no prosecutions of top executives at the major players in the financial crisis [4].
Why’s that? Well, according to a now-departed Justice Department official who used to be in charge of investigating such matters, the Justice Department has decided that holding top Wall Street executives criminally accountable is too difficult a task [5]. David Cardona, who recently left the FBI for a job at the Securities and Exchange Commission, told the Wall Street Journal that bringing financial wrongdoing to account is “better left to regulators,” who can bring civil cases.
Civil cases, of course, can produce penalties from the banks -- as well as promises to be on better behavior [6] -- but don’t put any executives behind bars. Should Some Bankers Be Prosecuted? by Jeff Madrick and Frank Partnoy. Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse by the Majority and Minority Staff, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, US Senate 639 pp., available at hsgac.senate.gov.
Bank Fraud Prosecution Continues to Drop under Obama. Finance/Insurance/Real Estate: Lobbying, 2011. Total for Finance, Insurance & Real Estate: $488,656,400Total Number of Clients Reported: 957Total Number of Lobbyists Reported: 2,441 View our complete Lobbying profile for Finance/Insurance/Real Estate Industries in this Sector: Search for an industry: Feel free to distribute or cite this material, but please credit the Center for Responsive Politics.
For permission to reprint for commercial uses, such as textbooks, contact the Center. Citigroup Whistle-Blower Says Bank’s ‘Brute Force’ Hid Bad Loans From U.S. Four years after rotten mortgages helped trigger a global financial crisis, Sherry Hunt said her Citigroup Inc. quality-control team was still finding flaws in new loans that included altered tax forms, straw buyers and borrowers who listed fictitious employers.
Instead of reporting the defects to the Federal Housing Administration, the bank saddled the agency with losses by falsely declaring the loans fit for its federal insurance program, according to a complaint filed yesterday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan. Citigroup agreed to pay $158.3 million to settle the claims, and admitted that it certified loans for FHA backing that didn’t qualify. Hunt, who filed a sealed lawsuit against New York-based Citigroup in August that the government joined, will collect $31 million of that sum -- before taxes and attorney’s fees -- as a whistle-blower, she said in an interview yesterday.
Inspector General. Goldman Wins New York Fed Auction for A.I.G. Assets. ReutersRobert Benmosche, chief of American International Group. 8:43 p.m. | Updated Goldman Sachs is picking up some of the pieces from the wreckage of the American International Group. On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York announced that it had sold assets with a face value of $6.2 billion to Goldman, which trumped four other investment banks for the securities. The auction — the second such sale this year — signals the renewed interest in mortgage-related investments and other risky securities at the center of the financial crisis. In recent months, banks, hedge funds and other big investors have been snapping up the bonds, betting on a rebound in their prices. The $7 trillion secret loan program: The government and big banks should be punished for deceiving the public about their hush-hush bailout scheme. 7.77 trillion in secret Federal Reserve loans to banks?
More on those secret Federal Reserve loans to banks. Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks Undisclosed $13B. The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret.