dimelab dimelab: shrinking the gap between talk and action.

obscene Topic in The Credit Debacle Catalog

moral obscenity (1); obscene speculative casino (1).

naked capitalism Wed 2010-01-13 11:54 EST

William Black'' ``Anti-Regulators: The Federal Reserve's War Against Effective Regulation''

...This essay focuses on Chairman Bernanke recent appointment of Dr. Parkinson to lead the Fed's examination and supervision. My central point is that Dr. Bernanke appointed Dr. Parkinson because he shared Dr. Bernanke's anti-regulatory ideology and has never changed those views, even in the face of the Great Recession. The anti-regulator policies that Bernanke and Parkinson championed were the principal drivers of the fraud epidemic that have produced recurrent, intensifying crises...First, Dr. Parkinson was a leading proponent of the obscene (and successful) effort to prevent Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Brooksley Born from taking regulatory action to prevent destructive credit default swaps (CDS). Second, Dr. Parkinson, like Greenspan and Bernanke, subscribed to the naïve view that fraud was impossible in sophisticated financial markets and that credit rating agencies were reliable. Third, Dr. Parkinson endorsed the international ``competition in regulatory laxity'' that Dr. Bernanke (belatedly) warned has degraded regulation on a global basis...

anti regulators; effectively regulated; Federal Reserve's War; naked capitalism; William Black.

Sun 2008-08-24 00:00 EDT

Here comes the downsizing of finance

by Martin Hutchinson (Prudent Bear); auction-rate securities (ARS); credit default swaps (CDS); ``CDS market creates many times as much risk as it hedges or transfers''; GSEs ``leveraged more than would have been possible without the governments quasi-guarantee, lobbied like to crazy to ensure they were not properly regulated and collapsed thankfully into the arms of the taxpayer as soon as ill winds began to blow...by their presence they turned the soundest product in financial markets, the home mortgage, into an obscene speculative casino, causing collateral damage of many times their own losses.'' ``much of the financial services innovation of the last generation was spurious and unsound, and needs to be done away with''

comes; downsizing; finance.

Thu 2008-01-24 00:00 EST

Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson, How to Sink America

"Military Keynesianism"; "morally obscene", "fiscally unsustainable" US military expenditures

Chalmers Johnson; Sink America; Tomgram.