Fed Up, Consumers Down
The Federal Reserve isn't exactly known as a friend of the little guy. And for good reason. So it borders on parody that Senate Finance Committee poobahs are close to a deal to fold the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency into the Fe...
Audit Notes: CDS Ban, WSJ v. NYT, A No-Layoffs Policy
Wolfgang Munchau asks in the Financial Times why it's still legal to buy credit-default swaps when you don't own the underlying asset: A naked CDS purchase means that you take out insurance on bonds without actually owning them. It is a purely...
The Unemployed on the Payday Loan Treadmill
The Los Angeles Times reports that payday lenders are feasting on the jobless, taking huge chunks of their unemployment checks in exchange for advancing them money for a week or two. No job? No problem. A typical unemployed Californian receivi...
Breakingviews Says This Out of Love, Goldman
Shorter Reuters Breakingviews: "The great Goldman Sachs, despite its greatness, should apologize for not living up to its higher standards of greatness which are greater than others." It's been a while since I've read such a gullible piece of ...
Audit Notes: North Dakota Tea, WSJ Heds, AP Charge
This is good bread-and-butter business reporting by The Wall Street Journal. It reports on an oil boom unfolding in North Dakota, thanks to new technology that the industry has developed to exploit fields that were once too hard to get to. The...
No Context on the Fed’s New Fangs
Since when has the Federal Reserve been an investigative pit bull? Since never. But don't look to the major papers for that context this morning in their reports on Chairman Bernanke's toughish comments to Congress yesterday on Goldman Sachs a...
Audit Notes: NYT CDS, Embargoes, Obama Folds
I had some reservation about the Times story on Greece and credit-default swaps this morning. Although I liked the idea of pointing out that Wall Street is making bets against Greece after helping it conceal its true indebtedness, I noted that...
Reinflating the Bubble
A relative of mine just got this in the mail from Bank of America Home Loans (ie: Countrywide) offering to refinance his home loan with a ten-year interest-only option ARM (well, it's unclear if it's actually an ARM or if it's a fixed-rate mor...
Are Swaps Helping Create a Greek Death Spiral?
It's a good idea for The New York Times to point out that Wall Street is betting against Greece after having helped get it in dire straits. Banks helped Greece obscure its actual debt from regulators (and investors, which seems like where any...
Audit Notes: Rewrite, Taibbi’s Coffee, TBTF Antitrust
Jonathan Stray of the Nieman Journalism Lab finds that of 121 stories on Google hackers being traced to schools in China, just thirteen contained original reporting and only seven were "primarily based on original reporting." All but one were ...
Was IndyMac a Sweetheart Deal or Just Sweet?
The Los Angeles Times is good to point out that the consortium of billionaires and might-as-well-be-billionaires, including George Soros and John Paulson, who bought the former IndyMac from the FDIC is making out like bandits on the deal. They...
When Government Acts Like Private Industry
The Wall Street Journal is good this morning to look at how public entities dirtied their hands in the bubble by teaming up on investment deals that preyed on low-to-middle-income people. It's specifically looking at Calpers—the enormous...
