Giving Toxic Waste a Bad Name

Face it, if we found out that a Vegas casino was run like our banking system, the worst strung out addict wouldn’t gamble there.

Even they wouldn’t be able to stand the stench.

Casino operators know you have to provide at least the appearance that the games aren’t crooked.

Casino operators know they can’t force people to spend their hard-earned money gambling on a toxic waste dump.

But the bankers and their political cronies who have been playing us for suckers forced us to pay to clean up the shambles, as well as the continuing costs of the broken economy.

Now the casino operators are trying to assure us that everything is hunky-dory, but that same foul scent is still wafting from their dumpsite. Goldman Sachs shrugs off  the Securities and Exchange Commission’s fraud charges, hiring the president’s former lawyer to fight them, while it rakes in eye-popping profits that beat even the most optimistic projections.

The man we hoped would clean up the mess, President Obama, appears at long last to be taking a more nimble, hands-on approach to financial reform than he did on health insurance reform. But the plans endorsed by him and the Democratic leadership contain too little actual reform and too much reshuffling of the same weak hand regulators have been bringing to the casino.

We’ll never win against the sharks the way the game is rigged now.

That’s the bitter lesson brought home by the revelations of the last month, from probes into the tragic bank follies of the Lehman and Washington Mutual collapses, and the  SEC lawsuit charging Goldman-Sachs with fraud.

As we learn more details of each of these debacles, they provide potent weapons  in the fight to overhaul the system that led to the financial meltdown.

Far from being an unforeseeable natural disaster, it was a predictable consequence of the system we still have in place today. In each case, the financial giants rigged the game with fraudulent bookkeeping and lack of disclosure while regulators looked the other way. And far from being isolated instances of improper conduct, the Lehman, WAMU and Goldman fiascoes are prime examples of how far the financial industry has fallen in common sense and ethical standards.

But the Democrat leadership has squandered its credibility on financial reform, offering legislation that largely preserves the status quo.

Rather than galvanizing public outrage against Wall Street into support for fundamental change to rebuild a financial system that truly serves our economy, the president and the Democratic leadership are caving in to Wall Street lobbyists and Republican obstructionists who pay lip service to reform while they block and dilute it.

Meanwhile, we’re treated to the truly disgraceful spectacle of each party accusing the other of having taken more campaign cash from Goldman-Sachs and the other major casino operators than the other.

The truth is they’re both beholden to the cash generated by the toxic dump of our financial system. The Democrats may be ahead in the fundraising game right now, but the Republicans are working hard to curry favor from Wall Street and catch up.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are left on the sidelines.

Fortunately we don’t have to stay there.
Several other Democratic senators have proposed amendments worthy of support.

Among the most articulate voices for a stronger version of reform is Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Delaware. Along with senators Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, Carl Levin D-MI, Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., Kaufman has proposed a bill that moves toward rebuilding the wall that used to separate traditional, federally guaranteed banking activities from high-risk speculative gambling. That wall was torn down when the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act was repealed during the Clinton Administration. In addition, a conservative Democrat who faces a tough reelection fight, Blanche Lincoln, D-Arkansas, has proposed derivatives regulation that is substantially tougher than that which has been proposed by the Obama Administration.

Now is the time to clean up the casino. We have to channel our  genuine, justified anger into action to push our politicians to do the right thing, whether they want to or not.

Action / Glass-Steagel / Goldman-Sachs / Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 04/20/2010

Around the Web: SEC Takes a Bite of Squid

So is it just coincidence that the SEC brings it first major fraud case against  “a too big to fail” Wall Street bank just as the president and the Democrats gear up for battle over financial reform in the Senate?

I don’t think so. Not any more than it’s an accident that a Senate committee was holding a continuing series of tough hearings on the Washington Mutual collapse putting WAMU’s lame leadership and regulators under the harsh glare of the spotlight. Story here, documents here.

Last year, journalist Matt Taibbi immortalized Goldman in Rolling Stone as the “world’s most powerful investment bank…a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

That may have sounded like colorful hyperbole at the time. But now with what we know about how Goldman functioned in Greece, California and other places, it turns out to be a factual statement.

The SEC has charged Goldman with deceiving investors who bought collateralized debt obligations tied to the performance of residential mortgage-back securities. The press release is here; complaint here. The investment bank failed to tell the investors that a hedge fund that had played a major role in selecting the collection of mortgages that went into the CDO was also taking a short position against the CDO, according to the SEC complaint. Meaning Goldman and the hedge fund knew the mortgages stunk but peddled it to investors anyway. Nice.

“Goldman wrongly permitted a client that was betting against the mortgage market to heavily influence which mortgage securities to include in an investment portfolio, while telling other investors that the securities were selected by an independent, objective third party,” said Robert Khuzami, the director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement.

Also charged is a 31-year old Goldman senior VP, Fabrice Tourre, the author of the following 2007 email to a friend, quoted in the SEC complaint, which should become an especially potent weapon in the fight to bolster financial reform as it moves through the Senate in the coming weeks.

“More and more leverage in the system, The whole building is about to collapse anytime now...Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab[rice Tourre]...standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstruosities!!!”

Goldman-Sachs / Martin Column / Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) - 04/16/2010

Around the Web: Can WAMU be the Blue Cross of Financial Reform?

During the debate over health care reform, the public was galvanized by the disclosure of  outrageous insurance rate increases by Blue Cross.

It was that public outrage that finally got the healthcare legislation passed over Republican opposition.

Now Senate backers of  a strong overhaul of the financial system hope that televised hearings on the details of the reckless lending, incompetent management and multiple regulatory failures that sank the nation’s largest savings and loan will fuel support for financial reform in the face of relentless opposition from Wall Street.

The hearings got underway Tuesday in the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, headed by Sen. Carl Levin,D-Michigan.

In strong contrast to hearings  held recently by the congressionally appointed committee to investigate the financial crisis, Levin’s opening hearing was tough, pointed and thorough. Levin said he intended for the hearings to serve as a case study for what happened at financial institutions during the meltdown. He compared WAMU’s selling and packaging of  high-risk option ARM and no-doc loans to dumping “pollutants into a river.”

Calling Washington Mutual’s former CEO Kerry Killinger “a forgotten villain of the financial crisis", Fortune’s Colin Barr sets the stage here. Business Week recounts the testimony here. CSPAN carried the hearings live they can be viewed here.

The star witnesses from WAMU were Killinger and former Chief Operating Officer Stephen Rotella. Killinger testified that WAMU was unfairly targeted by regulators because it not “too clubby to fail” as were larger financial institutions. Killinger insisted WAMU could have worked its way out of the crisis if regulators hadn’t eventually shut it down.

On Friday, we’ll hear from the regulators, who were well aware of WAMU’s questionable lending and securitization but continued to find that the savings and loan was financially sound.

Around the Web / Martin Column / Outrage - 04/13/2010

The Reform Charade

Remember when the president’s chief of staff, Rahn Emmanuel,  strode onto the political stage and stirringly channeled Churchill, saying: “Never waste a crisis?”

It turns out that what he was really saying was: “Never waste an opportunity to reward your campaign contributors.”

Two years after the credit meltdown that crippled our economy, the financial system remains way too complicated and continues to reward high risk and focus on short-term profits that offer few benefits to those who aren’t bankers.

And even after the fiasco we’ve been through, the banks continue to  snooker the snoozing watchdogs.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported how 18 banks have continued to manipulate their financial reporting to disguise from regulators their real level of risky borrowing.

And this is after the generous, no strings attached bailout that put trillions of taxpayer-backed dollars into the hands of the big banks.

We need a massive overhaul. What we’re getting instead is a charade, tricked out by a Democratic leadership intent on rewarding failure, propping up the status quo and labeling that reform.

One of the few U.S. senators who’s offering a stronger version of reform and consistent candor on the shortcomings of the leadership’s proposals is the man who replaced Vice President Joe Biden. Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Delaware, said last month: “After a crisis of this magnitude, it amazes me that some of our reform proposals effectively maintain the status quo in so many critical areas, whether it is allowing multi-trillion-dollar financial conglomerates that house traditional banking and speculative activities to continue to exist and pose threats to our financial system, permitting banks to continue to determine their own capital standards, or allowing a significant portion of the derivatives market to remain opaque and lightly regulated.”

The Democratic senators would do well to be guided by the words of someone who was one of them not long ago, who was particularly astute about the toxic influence of lobbyists and campaign cash on our economy and the political process.

Back when he was a U.S. senator, President Obama wrote in the Financial Times in 2007 that the subprime crisis “was also a parable of how an excess of lobbying and influence can defeat the common sense rules of the road, placing both consumers and the nation’s well-being at risk.”

Washington, Obama wrote, “needs to stop acting like an industry advocate and start acting like a public advocate.”

Candidate Obama wouldn’t have been shocked by the new report from the Treasury Department’s Inspector General about how the two regulating agencies which were supposed to watching over Washington Mutual bungled the job before the bank collapsed in 2008, under the weight of worthless subprime mortgages, resulting in the largest bank failure in U.S. history.

It turns out that regulators were well aware of the foul odors coming off the carcass of Washington Mutual’s loan business. But the Office of Thrift Supervision continued to find the bank “fundamentally sound” and didn’t raise alarms until days before it collapsed.

We can’t let our leaders ignore these harsh lessons that came with such a high price. They may be able to squander a crisis, but without some meaningful change to rein in the financial industry, the crisis may waste the rest of us.

Martin Column - 04/12/2010

Around the Web: From Maestro to Cornered Rat

When he used to appear before Congress during boom times, Alan Greenspan was worshipped as a hero. The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward wrote an insider’s, book-length Valentine dubbing him the maestro. That was a stark contrast to the bruising the former Fed chair took this week from the panel appointed to investigate the financial meltdown. The reviews of his performance were even tougher.

No wonder. Greenspan lamely tried to evade responsibility for the policies he orchestrated that led to the worst economic crisis since the Depression. CBS Econwatch blogger Jill Schlesinger labeled Greenspan’s appearance “ a trip to the land of denial.”

Brooksley Born, one of the commissioners on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, bluntly told Greenspan that the Fed “failed to prevent the housing bubble, failed to prevent the predatory lending scandal, failed to prevent the activities that would bring the financial system to the verge of collapse.”

A little historical context: Greenspan helped undermine Born’s efforts to regulate derivatives when she was head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission in the Clinton Administration.

Frederic Sheehan, who’s written several books lambasting Greenspan and the Fed, credited the panel with doing a decent job in preparing for his testimony. Sheehan noted that Greenspan wasn’t used to having to answer follow-ups and seemed stumped. When he used to appear before the Senate as Fed chief, senators “were afraid, they didn’t want to look foolish in asking simple questions. A lot of the really simple questions are the ones that are still unaddressed or need to be addressed but never were when he was Fed chairman, particularly about money and credit. He walked away from those questions again today.”
One common theme in reviewing Greenspan’s performance was incredulity at his assertion that he was caught by surprise by the mortgage crisis. Diane E. Thompson, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center, said in an interview with Washington Independent’s Anne Lowrey that she and other members of the Federal Reserve’s Advisory Council started warning Greenspan about mortgage problems in the early 2000s.

Meanwhile Angelides has problems of his own. Members of his panel complained to the New York Times that he seemed more interested in headline-grabbing hearings than deep investigation, that the panel had wasted too much time getting started and had issued no subpoenas even though it has the power to do so. As David Dayen writes on Firedoglake, “If anyone was watching this but me and the WSJ, they would have seen a cornered rat. Born nailed Greenspan – although, given the relative lack of interest in the FCIC, the benefit to that will be merely psychic in nature.” Stay tuned….

Around the Web / Federal Reserve / Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission / Martin Column - 04/09/2010

Bursting D.C.'s Bubble

The battle for financial reform comes down to the ownership of one critical piece of real estate, one that has managed to avoid the crash that has ended the dreams of security for so many: the nation’s Capital.

“We’re at a critical moment point in our democracy,” Elizabeth Warren, the congressional bailout monitor, told those of us gathered on a webinar Wednesday. “Either the banks own Washington or the people do.”

Warren was referring to something that the Democratic Senate whip, Dick Durbin, said last year about the place where he works, in an rare moment of a politician telling the truth:  “The banks own this place.”

Elizabeth Warren, a tireless promoter of consumer protection and truth teller about the decline of the decline of fortunes of regular folks, prefers to view Durbin’s declaration as premature.

But a more definitive answer is not far off, according to Warren; it could come next month. The full Senate is expected to begin debate on financial reform when it returns from recess this month with a final vote in May.

Congress is one place where the bubble hasn’t burst. The value of those congressional seats hasn’t gone down since the crash; it’s gone up. Representatives and senators are raking n more than ever from corporate lobbyists.

The banks are fully mobilized, unloading $1 million a day to block, neutralize and weaken reform. The webinar, sponsored by Americans for Financial Reform and Americans for Responsible Lending, was an effort to galvanize reform supporters into action.

As reluctant as I am to disagree with Warren about anything, on this one I’m with Durbin. From the evidence, it’s hard to see how Wall Street hasn’t gotten everything it wants from the politicians, even after the greatest financial meltdown since the Depression.

The question is whether we can take back that inflated piece of real estate and reestablish its true value.  Can we turn our frustration and rage over the bailouts and our elected representatives’ impotence into action?

There are marches – April 29th on Wall Street and May 17 on K street, where the lobbyists have their offices. And there are elected representatives to inundate with messages in favor of reform. Reform advocates can’t match the bankers’ cash, but they have people power on their side.

One questioner asked Warren at what point the Senate reform proposal from Sen. Chris Dodd, which was initially strong before Dodd watered it down, would become so weak it wouldn’t be worth supporting. Warren didn’t answer the question directly. “They’re not leaving much margin for error,” she said.

Unfortunately, when it comes to financial reform, the devil is in the details, and we have to insist on real reforms.

That means:

× Breaking up banks that are too big to fail (Dodd’s proposal doesn’t do that now).

× Creating a strong and independent financial consumer protection agency  (Dodd proposes to house it in the Fed, with other banking regulators able to veto the consumer protector’s decisions)

× Forcing banks to have more “skin in the game” (The Senate bill require bankers to keep money in reserve equal to 5 percent of loans they bundle and sell off; European regulators require twice that amount).

× Congress setting the amounts of capital financial institutions would have to keep on hand, rather than leaving it for the regulators to decide.

What we’ve learned in the past several months, from the report on the Lehman bankruptcy and the Fed’s recent disclosures on its involvement in Bear-Stearns takeover by J.P. Morgan, is that regulators weren’t asleep at the switch before, during and after the financial crisis. Rather, the regulators have actively colluded with the banks in an attempt to conceal the banks shady practices. Too much of what is being called financial reform is actually just maintaining the status quo while pretending to overhaul the system.

I don’t agree with a lot of what the Tea Party has offered. They don’t offer much in the way of positive proposals, and seem particularly weak in grappling with the issue of unchecked corporate power. But I think they’ve shown how a group of people (with some corporate funding) can shake up and shape a national debate. The Tea Party has no corner on frustration, anger, betrayal or the sense that something has gone deeply wrong in our country. There’s no reason we can’t channel that frustration and anger to plant the flag of real reform in the middle of real estate that, after all, belongs to us. Now’s the time to do it.
Here’s how to contact your senator and representative. Here’s the web site for Americans for Financial Reform.

Action / Consumer Financial Protection Agency / Martin Column / Too Big To Fail - 04/08/2010

One Reporter's Fight With the Fed

I didn’t know Mark Pittman, a reporter at Bloomberg News. We emailed a few times about the landmark lawsuit he instigated challenging Federal Reserve secrecy. I do know that Pittman is a genuine hero in a story which has very few.

He died too young last year, at 52. From what I gather, Pittman combined rumpled style, intellectual firepower and fierce persistence. The fight he waged to get the Fed to open its books serves as a lasting legacy and a strong reminder that one savvy, dogged person can make a real difference.

Earlier this month, Pittman’s employer, Bloomberg News Service, won yet another round in its fight with the Fed.

Federal Reserve / Martin Column - 03/31/2010

Letting Go Of Principals

After more than a year of ineffective attempts to stem the foreclosure crisis, the Obama administration this week may be edging toward acknowledging reality.

This sick housing market isn’t going to heal itself, and won’t get better with the band-aids they’ve applied so far. The stakes are high not just for the homeowners: without some stability in housing, the rest of the economy can’t heal either.

The administration announced today that it would begin to encourage banks to write down the principal when modifying borrower’s underwater mortgages. Bank of America also said this week it would tiptoe into principal reduction.

Time, and follow-through will tell whether the administration intends the principal write-downs as another band-aid or something more substantial. Time will also tell whether the administration will fight for write-downs or wilt in the face of the inevitable backlash. It’s also important to note that all of the administration’s foreclosure initiatives rely on the voluntary cooperation of lenders, with modest incentives paid by the government.

There is every reason for healthy skepticism of the administration and the banks’ ability to tackle the problem. As John Taylor, president of the National Reinvestment Coalition testified before a congressional panel this week: “We rush to give banks tax breaks, but we dawdle to help homeowners who through no fault of their own lost their jobs because of the economic crisis or bought defective loans that caused the economic crisis.”

Foreclosures / Martin Column - 03/26/2010

What Would Pecora Do?

There have been lots of positive comparisons between Phil Angelides and Ferdinand Pecora, who led an earlier investigation of Wall Street excesses that led to the Great Depression.

Pecora was a no-holds barred former prosecutor who ran his hearings with meticulous preparation and theatrical flair, and his work galvanized public support for widespread reforms.

Some have been impressed by Angelides’ reputation as a reformer from his days as California treasurer, when he tried to use the power of the state’s investments for socially worthy causes and implemented some protections for shareholders. Angelides was widely praised after public hearings earlier this year for his understanding of high finance and his scolding of the head of Goldman-Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, comparing him to a used –car dealer.

I’ve been less impressed by Angelides, who doesn’t seem to have a grasp on the opportunity he has to marshal support for real financial reform. And he’s too cozy with a Democratic leadership that’s been soft on Wall Street in the wake of the financial meltdown.

I’m also suspicious of Angelides, the politician and former real estate developer who unsuccessfully ran for governor against Arnold Schwarzenegger, because of his close ties to the Democratic Party elite. In addition, I’m wary of the impact of Angelides' main job running a coalition promoting green technologies. That’s certainly a laudable goal, but Angelides and his Apollo Alliance aren’t going to get very far without lobbying the Obama administration and the Democrats, who would not be happy with a hard-hitting report.
Whatever drama Angelides manages to muster at any given moment, I’m concerned that his multiple roles and background will cause him to soft-pedal his investigation. Those concerns were only heightened after Angelides surfaced as part of a curious SEC report last week that cautions firms about “pay to play” in the state investment business.
According to the SEC, when Angelides was running for treasurer in 2002 he hit up a top J.P. Morgan official to co-chair a fundraising event. It wasn’t just an honorary position. The price tag for the co-chairmanship? $10,000.

According to the report, the official didn’t co-chair the event but donated $1,000 to Angelides” campaign personally ­– and helped raise $8,000 more. In asking other J.P. Morgan brass to contribute to Angelides, the official noted that that the state of California was an important client for the firm.

Just how important became clear in the next couple of years, when J.P Morgan received about $37 million in fees from the state on more than 50 bond offerings totaling $15.8 billion – overseen by Angelides as state treasurer.

In the SEC’s curious take on the matter, neither Angelides nor J.P. Morgan is accused of doing anything improper.  Angelides isn’t even mentioned by name. The agency merely uses its report to caution finance officials about not running afoul of SEC regulations.

OK, so the SEC doesn’t think Angelides did anything wrong soliciting funds from J.P. Morgan and then giving them the state's business. But the report serves as a bitter reminder that those who we’re counting on to get to the bottom of the financial meltdown are steeped in the toxic brew of cash and politics that has seeped into the core of our government.

I hope I’m proven wrong about Angelides; that his intimacy with this unseemly world has left him with a sense of sustained outrage and not empathy for it.  But it will take more than a few zingers to convince me. I mean, let’s be serious. Would Ferdinand Pecora have solicited money from J.P Morgan? Not much chance. After Pecora grilled the son of the legendary banker, J.P. Morgan, Jr. described the investigator as having “the manners of an assistant prosecuting attorney who is trying to convict a horse thief.”

Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission / Martin Column - 03/23/2010

One Would Hope

The head of President Obama’s Security and Exchange Commission went before Congress Wednesday to wring her hands about how the Lehman fiasco “raises serious concerns” about the effectiveness of post-Enron reforms.

“One would hope,” SEC chair Mary Schapiro told a congressional committee wanly, that the post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley Act “would have prevented this kind of conduct.”

Eight years after Congress passed reforms that were supposed to prevent another Enron or WorldCom scandal, the Lehman mess reminds us how the government regulators and the accountants that are supposed to be vigilant watchdogs against destructive, deceptive bookkeeping continue to fail. They have remained in cahoots to ensure that the financial titans can ignore the rules and then evade the consequences for their bad and even fraudulent decisions.

According to the bankruptcy trustee’s scathing but sober 2,200 page report, Lehman used a financial maneuver known as Repo 105s, manipulating their financial reports disguise its bad debt from investors and the public as the company’s condition worsened before it finally went bankrupt, triggering the worst economic collapse since the Depression. The Repo 105 transactions secretly moved billions of dollars of debts off of Lehman’s books.

One would hope that President Obama and the Democrats would finally recognize  in the Lehman debacle that while Wall Street chieftains like Lehman CEO Richard Fuld may indeed be masters of a universe, it’s an alternate universe far from our own.

In that alternate universe, the bankruptcy trustee’s report detailing his company’s accounting shenanigans actually absolves Fuld of responsibility for his company’s demise. He told the New York Post the report showed he did nothing illegal.

After all, Fuld was CEO, way too busy to be bothered with details like how his company was hiding $50 billion worth of bad debt. In Fuld’s alternative universe, the Sarbanes-Oxley requirement that CEO’s sign off on the accuracy of their company’s financial statements didn’t apply to him.

In that alternate universe, when a court-appointed bankruptcy states that Fuld “was at least grossly negligent,” that amounts to getting a seal of approval.

Though Fuld’s company declared bankruptcy, his own fortunes did not suffer in any sense that someone forced to live in this universe, rather than that alternative one, would recognize as suffering. Between 2000 and 2008, he took home $484 million. He left with a $22 million retirement package. In fairness to Fuld, that’s a paltry sum by Wall Street standards for the head of a failed firm. By comparison, Merrill Lynch’s Richard Prince was paid $166 million before he left.

Also in fairness to Fuld, he was not the only one whose conduct was criticized in the Lehman report. But in Fuld’s alternate universe, when the trustee found that Lehman’s accounting firm, Ernst & Young, failed to show professional standards of care, that amounts to an award for public service.

In that alternate universe, the little people are just incapable of understanding why it’s better for Lehman to have concealed its debt to make the firm look healthier while it was in fact going down the toilet in 2008.

And taking a big chunk of our economy with it.

While I and most others who are not Richard Fuld find grounds for at least a thorough  criminal investigation rather than vindication in the Lehman trustee’s temperate prose, Fuld does have one point.

Everything that Lehman did to cook its books was done under the noses of federal regulators. So, Fuld insists that everything Lehman did was hunky-dory.

One would hope that the president and the Democrats would recognize that back here in the universe the rest of us live in, millions are suffering because of the deceit, arrogance and cluelessness of the bankers who seem to have escaped the meltdown with their wealth and power intact.

One would hope that if President Obama and the Democrats were serious about real reform, they would be making the Lehman report Exhibit One in an effort to discredit the financial lobbyists and their pals in Congress who are foiling efforts at sensible, robust regulation.

One would hope that the president and the Democrats would be determined to correct the mistakes of the past and not repeat them. One would hope the Lehman report would cure, once and for all, the president and the Democrats’ stunning lack of curiosity about how the financial industry blew up the universe we all live in. One would hope that the president and the Democrats wouldn’t find it acceptable to live in a universe where its masters aren’t accountable for their actions, but the rest of us are.

Executive Pay / Lehman / Martin Column / Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) - 03/19/2010