News Topic: Financial Institutions

The New York Times carried an important story about the risky investment moves of life insurance companies. ... Read full article

The Wall Street Journal ran a story today about H. Rodgin Cohen, the Senior Chairman of Sullivan & Cromwell and "one of Wall Street's top lawyers" decrying "the myth of regulatory capture." All I can say is wow. That's ... Read full article

I'm testifying before the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday at a hearing entitled " Preserving Consumer Choice and Financial Independence ." I'm the only non-industry witness (no surprise there). ... Read full article

I'm thrilled that Jay Westbrook has finally come into blogosphere with his posts on Single-Point-of-Entry .  I've blogged a little on SPOE already , but I want to highlight what I still think are two critical problems with SPOE. ... Read full article

Senator Elizabeth Warren surprised a lot of people by l aying into Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen as hard as she ever laid into Timothy Geithner . I think this was a really important exchange. But its easy to miss exactly what's being ... Read full article

In an earlier post I described the FDIC’s proposed SPOE approach to resolution of SIFI banks and other financial institutions under Title II of Dodd-Frank. That post discussed two of the three components of SPOE: control of the process by the regulator ... Read full article

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MBS investors suffered a serious legal blow a couple of months back when the Second Circuit held that the Trust Indenture Act of 1939 doesn't apply to MBS .  ... Read full article

Community banks are ailing.  Over the past decade many of them have failed or been gobbled up by larger banks. What's going on?  ... Read full article

Pretty darn dead.  In 2014, there were all of 22 private-label RMBS deals.  These deals provided $5.67 billion in financing for 7,342 mortgages.  Let that sink in for a second.  The private-label market financed fewer home mortgages than were made in the ... Read full article

There've been a bunch of post-mortems of the Antonio Weiss nomination in the press the last few days (see, e.g., here , here , and here ). ... Read full article

In today's Short View Column , Dan McCrum examines falling oil prices and the futures market, and then concludes: But the point of this story is not that some think they know what will happen next. Rather, it is that the price of one of the most ... Read full article

Just in time for the new year, I've got a new article called Safe Banking up on SSRN. The article is a first principles reexamination of the industrial organization of financial services. It identifies the institutional combination of deposits and ... Read full article

Will we have an appropriations bill before a government shutdown? The fight over the 2015 Appropriations Bill is now focused on one of the non-appropriations measures stuck onto the bill by the House GOP. That provision would repeal section 716 of the ... Read full article

As the Antonio Weiss nomination contest heats up , I'd like to pose a question that seems to be taken for granted by Weiss's supporters, namely that he's obviously qualified for the job.  As far as I can tell, Weiss's chief ... Read full article

Sometimes you can beat the door down with efforts to get Federal and State officials to tackle problems, but at the end of the day, locals can best get the job done, quietly and quickly. ... Read full article

There are three major new regulations shaping the housing finance market:  QM (qualified mortgage), QRM (qualified residential mortgage) and Reg X.  QM is a safe harbor from the statutory ability-to-repay requirement that applies to all mortgages.  QRM is ... Read full article

Yves Smith has had some great coverage of the AIG bailout trail over on Naked Capitalism.  While the litigation, as Yves has characterized it, is a bit like a brawl between the ugly stepsisters, it's telling us all kinds of stuff we didn't know ... Read full article