Investing guru Jim Rogers was in Chicago this week talking about, what else, commodities. But also expressing anger over Fed policy and the money printing policy of the Western world. He is still bullish on commodities but little else as Rogers told a crowd of invited guests of Price Asset Management.
The Financial Times reported yesterday that non-U.S. banks were among the biggest users of the $3.3 trillion in emergency lending facilities and programs created to address the financial crisis that emerged in the summer of 2007.
We know this thanks to the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires the Federal Reserve to post transaction level details of the 13 facilities and programs instituted by the Fed to help alleviate the global credit crisis.
The Futures Industry Association (FIA) hosted a panel on Oct. 18 to discuss the status of clearing in Chicago including a look at where we are going from here. Speakers included heads from the Options Clearing Corporation (OCC), CME Group and ICE Clear U.S. Of particular interest to each speaker was the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) rules that were proposed that would limit the ownership a single entity could hold in a swaps clearinghouse. (more…)
Congress passed a bill last week closing a loop hole in the Dodd-Frank Act that gave the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) broad exemption to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The exemption gave the SEC the ability to deny a much greater number of requests for information and came to light after the SEC cited the exemption when it denied Fox Business News information it had requested. (more…)
The financial landscape has become an alphabet soup of regulators, exchanges and registration categories that range from APs to USD. With the passage of the Dodd-Frank bill we have seen even more added, including some that we don’t even know what they will do or what they will look like yet. Two that we are still figuring out are swap exchange facilities and security-based swap exchange facilities, aptly shortened to SEFs and SB SEFs. To be fair, there has been talk for years about moving swaps to exchanges and clearinghouses. Until Lehman Brothers’ collapse, though, that’s all it really was – talk. Now with a government mandate, the clock is ticking before SEFs are expected to be up and running.
Last week I attended an interesting forum at the University Club of Chicago. It was entitled “America’s Fiscal Futures: Making Difficult Choices.”
The forum was put on by the MacArthur Foundation and included a discussion with Dr. John Palmer and Rudolph Penner. The two speakers, who come from different sides of the political spectrum, recently co-chaired a joint National Academy of Sciences/National Academy of Public Administration committee that produced the report “Choosing the Nation’s Fiscal Future.”
The Washington Post reported today that commercial banks and investment institutions are shifting their political donations towards Republicans. Apparently Democrats were garnering two-thirds of those donations as recently as the beginning of 2009 and now that is shifting to an even split despite the Democratic majority.
This can sarcastically be placed under “shocking news” of the day category but there is something even more cynical at play in this world of no shame.
Back in March we wrote about the report “Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America,” published by Essential Information and the Consumer Education Foundation. The report stated that $5 billion in political influence purchasing in Washington over the past decade had led to our current economic collapse.
The report was anything but shocking as the influence of big money on public policy is no secret. Many depression era reforms were struck down in the past decade, which allowed among other things the merger of commercial and investment banking and an increase in the amount of leverage financial institutions could utilize.
Blogger Felix Salmon tossed out the subject of whether a PhD in Financial Journalism should be created, apparently in light of the poor job done by the media in covering the credit crisis. Actually he notes that an ex Lehman Bros. executive is trying to create such an education track and Salmon threw it out for public discussion and it has been bandied about by media based chat rooms.
The Nation recently published an interesting article on the financial crisis of 2008 citing the head of the obscure regulatory body the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), John Dugan, as one of the prime architects of our current economic woes.
I’ve read several lists citing people to blame for last year’s financial turmoil and Mr. Dugan, if cited, certainly wouldn’t be on the list of usual suspects.
