The banks have systematically figured out how to rip off the government,” Lerner says.
Part of that ripoff was the LIBOR scandal, which had a “massive consequence on everything,” according to Wallace Turbeville, a former Goldman Sachs employee and current senior fellow at nonpartisan think tank Demos.
Massive fraud in the high-speed trading markets is escaping detection because regulators and exchanges are dithering on a powerful supercomputer to uncover the scams, The Post has learned.
And as retail investors begin dipping their toes back into stocks, now at record prices, the market watchdogs are asleep at the wheel.
WASHINGTON -- A bipartisan cadre of House lawmakers will move on legislation to deregulate Wall Street derivatives Wednesday, less than a week after Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) released adevastating report on the multibillion-dollar derivatives debacle at JPMorgan Chase.
On March 15, 2013, the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held hearings on the London Whale scandal. The indomitable and indefatigable Chairman Carl Levin, ably supported by the brilliant committee chief of staff, Elise Bean, took on six JP Morgan Chase (“JPMC”) current and former executives for four hours and three regulators for two, with support from other Committee members.
In the latest anti-HFT salvo, a 12-year veteran of Goldman Sachs Monday applied a new definition to the essence of high frequency trading, seeing it as a purposeful distortion of the flow of market information rather than just a successful trading technique. With that he also prescribed a financial transaction tax as part of a cure.
You may have seen a big outbreak in the academic literature and business media of defenses of liquidity for liquidity’s sake, evidently prompted by increased interest in and in the EU, implementation of transaction taxes as a way to tame speculation and secondarily raise revenues.
During an appearance on CNBC yesterday, Charlie Munger, deputy to billionaire investor Warren Buffett, had some harsh words for high-frequency trading, the practice used by huge financial firms to trade stocks in milliseconds. “Take the rapid trading by the computer geniuses with the computer algorithms,” said Munger. “Those people have all the social utility of a bunch of rats admitted to a granary.”
I attended the oral argument in the Voting Rights Act case before the U.S. Supreme Court, and I came away even more convinced that the Court should uphold the contested parts of the law.
Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act requires that covered states "preclear" their proposed election law changes with federal officials. Nine states plus parts of seven others are "covered," and many of these areas are in the South.
Democratic lawmakers say allowing voters to register and cast ballots on the same day would increase election participation, but some county officials worry that it would further complicate the voting process.
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States with same-day registration have turnout rates nearly 6 percent higher than states that don’t offer it, according to Demos, a progressive public policy research group.
Though technology and innovation have squeezed trading costs, the industry's profits are accounting for a bigger share of U.S. GDP, a former Goldman banker says, needlessly diverting some $635 bln from the broader economy. It lends credence to ideas like a transaction tax.
Before the Great Recession, the financial sector had consistently been eating up a greater and greater share of the economy. In 2007, it accounted for a whopping 40 percent of corporate profits. Before 1950, the financial sector made up less than 3 percent of GDP; now it makes up more than 8 percent.
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Massachusetts Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren is likely to focus her efforts on the Senate Banking Committee in areas that go far beyond her bread-and-butter expertise in consumer protection, analysts say.
Despite President Obama’s important, even landmark, accomplishments, by the time November 6 arrived, many Americans were disappointed with his first term. They expected him to be a “transformational” president who would somehow, single-handedly, change Washington’s political culture.
No doubt the new International Energy Agency (IEA)'s latest World Energy Outlook will be cause for celebration for the fossil fuel industry. In it, IEA points to the strong oil and gas production in the U.S. and predicts that by within a decade or so, the U.S. will become the world's largest oil producer, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Russia. By 2030, North America could be a net oil exporter and, around the same time, the U.S. will likely be energy independent.
Of course, no one should attempt to vote if he or she is not legally registered, but documented cases of actual voter fraud are rare. True the Vote is aiming to train as many as one million poll “observers,” and the scope of that effort far exceeds any real problem of illegal voting; instead, it seems intended to intimidate voters. As True the Vote’s top organizer reportedly told recruits during a training session in South Florida, their job is to make voters feel as if they are “driving and seeing the police following you.” This isn’t a civics lesson.