Financial Institutions

Hacking and Systemic Financial Armageddon

10/03/14

The revelation that 76 million JPMorgan Chase consumer accounts were compromised by hacking should be scaring the heck out of us. The Chase hacking is a red flag that hacking poses a real systemic risk to our banking system, and a national security risk as well. Frankly, I find this stuff a lot scarier than either ISIS or our still largely unregulated shadow banking space.  

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Markets?

10/02/14

Some thoughts on how much faith we should have in the debt markets, and whether they are actually markets at all, over at Dealb%k.

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Single-Point-of-Entry: No Bank Left Behind

08/31/14

Last December the FDIC put out for comment a proposal for a Single-Point-of-Entry (SPOE) Strategy to implement its Orderly Liquidation Authority (OLA) under Title II of Dodd-Frank. Single-Point-of-Entry has gotten a lot of policy traction. The Treasury Secretary supports it and there’s huge buy-in from Wall Street.

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MBS Settlements--Following the Money

08/25/14

Financial crisis litigation has been going on for several years now and has been resulting in lots of piecemeal settlements. As a result, it's easy to miss the big picture.  There's actually been quite a lot of settlements covering a fair amount of money.  (Not all of it is real money, of course, but the notionals add up).  

By my counting, there have been some $94.6 billion in settlements announced or proposed to date dealing with mortgages and MBS.  

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The Problem of Centrality

08/10/14

The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation has a feature on my new paper about the resolution of CCPs (aka clearinghouses).

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Once More, With ... Something

07/24/14

So we are again treated to what has become an annual tradition:  the analysis of Dodd-Frank on its anniversary.  The Republicans trot out a report critical of the Act, and the Democrats defend it.  Yawn.

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A bubble in deceptive, abusive subprime auto lending?

07/20/14

In a long story in today's edition, the New York Times is reporting a bubble in often deceptive and abusive subprime auto lending on unaffordable terms, including very high rates of interest.  Although not quite the threat to the overall economy that the subprime mortgage bubble created eight or nine years ago, this apparent new bubble in lending for used vehicles has some similar features (targeting vulnerable consumers, lax underwriting, securit

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