If You Can't Explain it, You Can't Regulate it

Imagine if government officials who controlled some crucial aspect of our lives, say the war in Afghanistan, spoke about it in public only in another language.

Greek, say.

Only those who understood Greek would be able to talk about it or ask questions.

Now imagine that those who controlled the policy were unelected, appointed by a mysterious group of Greek-speaking weapons manufacturers whose business would benefit from the war.

Got it?

That’s about what we have in the U.S. Federal Reserve, a quasi-government agency that speaks in its own language, whose members are appointed by banks, and are not accountable to anybody else.

Federal Reserve / Martin Column - 11/24/2009

Wall Street Gives Thanks

(Translated into English by Harvey Rosenfield)

November 22, 2009

Dear People of the Rest of the Country:

The holidays are here. Like you, we have all worked very hard during this difficult and trying year.  Now it’s time for all Americans to take a well-deserved few days off, chill out at your favorite Caribbean getaway, crack open a bottle (we like the 2006 Antinori Cab), gather around family and friends and yachts, and recognize how blessed we are for getting to “do God’s work,” as Master Blankfein says.

Harvey Column / Uncategorized - 11/23/2009

Rating Wall Street's New Sheriff

By Martin Berg

In the 1930s, the Senate Banking committee appointed a no-nonsense assistant district attorney named Ferdinand Pecora to lead an investigation into the causes of the stock crash of 1929.

Pecora held hearings that were equal parts public spectacle and tough scrutiny of the financial industry’s abuses. His investigation, closely followed by an angry American public, led to a raft of reforms of the banking system, most notably the Glass- Steagal Act, which kept the federally guaranteed business of making loans and taking deposits separate from other, riskier aspects of banking and investing.

Now Congress has appointed a financial inquiry commission to explore our recent financial meltdown.

The panel will not be headed by a hard-nosed prosecutor but by a real estate developer who became Democratic California treasurer from 1999 to 2007 and then an unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate, Phil Angelides.

Uncategorized - 11/18/2009

Prophetic Warnings Haunt Regulation Debate

Here’s how the highly partisan, polarized view of who’s to blame for the financial crisis breaks out:

Liberals blame Bush era deregulation which allowed greedy head bankers to run amok.

Conservatives blame poor people, who encouraged Democratic politicians who cater to them to force banks to lower their lending standards. And of course, there’s ACORN.

But those clashing views break down when you look into the history of the fight to repeal the landmark Depression-era Glass-Steagal  Act.

Glass-Steagel / Martin Column - 11/13/2009

Go Ahead, Put All Your Eggs in Our Basket

A simple homily illustrates the folly of letting Wall Street govern itself free of restraints so that a handful of financial firms could become indispensable to our nation’s economy: “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

One of the precursors of the financial meltdown was the combination of zero enforcement of the antitrust laws and the repeal of Depression-era safeguards against allowing banks to engage in speculation in the stock markets. That created a handful of financial institutions that were individually and collectively so interwoven with our economy that when the crash came last year, we were told that they had to be rescued or else their collapse would take down the entire system. These giant firms were so important that, we were told, they were just “too big to fail.”

Harvey Column - 11/10/2009

Size Matters

The administration that promised change we can believe in and the highest level of transparency in history now delivers “too big to fail” banks - bigger, more complicated and secret than ever.

First, the Obama administration and the Democratic majority in Congress continued policies that assured a number of large financial institutions that taxpayers had bailed out after the financial collapse got even larger and more powerful.

Now the administration and congressional leadership have proposed a scheme that leaves the big banks in place, with a regulatory scheme that provides more questions than answers, with secrecy that treats the banking system like a CIA covert operation.

Martin Column / Too Big To Fail - 11/09/2009

Too Big To Get Sick: Vaccine for the Swine

If they are “too big to fail” then they are obviously “too big to get sick.” Guess that’s why Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and JP Morgan Chase are getting doses of the H1N1 flu vaccine from the government ahead of virtually everyone else in the country. The firms are on a special list approved by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, a federal agency. Most doctors here in Los Angeles still can’t obtain the vaccine for their patients.

Harvey Column / Outrage - 11/05/2009