News Topic: Financial Institutions

I've held my tongue for a while on the proposed class settlement in the multidistrict credit card interchange fee litigation (MDL 1720).  I'm weighing in on it now.  I've written up an analysis of the proposed settlement.  It's  ... Read full article

I've got a new short article out about swaps clearinghouses.  It's a response piece to an article by Prof. Yesha Yadav . ... Read full article

The SEC enters into another rounding error settlement with a financial insitution, this time Wells Fargo . ... Read full article

Bill Bratton and I have a new paper out , called A Transactional Genealogy of Scandal:  from Michael Milken to Enron to Goldman Sachs. ... Read full article

The English High Court just ruled in Assenagon Asset Management S.A. v. Irish Bank Resolution Corporation Limited (formerly Anglo Irish Bank ) that a popular technique used to pressure bondholders to participate in a debt restructuring, as deployed by ... Read full article

Matthew Yglesias has a fantastic piece about the Barofsky-Geithner proxy debate on the financial crisis.  Read it here . The only thing I would add is to note how this same debate continued through the mortgage servicing scandal and the debate over the ... Read full article

If I rob a federally insured bank and make off with $20,000, I'm facing years of federal prison time. If I defraud federal insurance programs, be they FHA or Medicaid, I'm also facing years of prison. If I engage in insider trading, I could also ... Read full article

The number one agenda item for small banks is to repeal the physical, on-machine disclosure requirement for ATMs.  Yes, I'm serious, that, that is the top agenda item for small banks. And they wonder why they're not doing so well... ... Read full article

For the past couple of years, I've been thinking that cramdown is dead as a policy solution. But I was thinking about cramdown as requiring legislation. It doesn't. We could start doing it tomorrow. Under current bankruptcy law, a Chapter 13 ... Read full article

Folks in Washington tell me there is a general sense of “foreclosure fatigue” in our nation’s capital. It’s just so boring to keep thinking about all the people losing their homes year after year. Can’t we move on to something new? This attitude goes ... Read full article

FHFA has sued the State of Illinois and some local government units claiming that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are exempt from state and local real estate transfer taxes. FHFA's argument is basically that the GSEs are subject only to non-discriminatory ... Read full article

The wheels of litigation move slowly, but there are a couple of recent securitization fail litigation decisions that are worthy of note. First, in the Congress case, a wrongful foreclosure action in Alabama (see my previous blogging on it here ), the ... Read full article

Blackstone on Chase, via Bloomberg : “Occasional losses are inevitable,” said Blackstone Group LP’s Stephen A. Schwarzman, 65, CEO of the largest private- equity firm. “Publicly excoriating JPMorgan serves no purpose except to reduce people’s confidence ... Read full article

Bloomberg has an editorial arguing that making banks boring won't prevent a crisis; only increasing bank capital will do so.   ... Read full article

Credit Slips alumni John Pottow sent me an op-ed from Freep.com. Being an idiot, it took me a while to figure out that this was the Detroit Free Press . John takes on the huge trading loss at J.P. Morgan and the continued need to regulate financial ... Read full article

A few quick thoughts and suggested readings on Chase's ever expanding losses from the Whale Trade. First, if you have not been reading Lisa Pollack's Alphaville posts on this topic you really must. ... Read full article

The Fed released some data on debit interchange fees since the Durbin Amendment went into effect ( here  in spreadsheet and here  as a memo with more data). It's all still very early numbers, and things may well change. But so far a few noteworthy ... Read full article

Here's a plug for a conference on mobile payments that the FTC is hosting next week.  It will be webcast live.  The agenda is  here .  I'm one of the speakers.   ... Read full article