News Topic: Too Big to Fail (TBTF)

So the financial industry got a surprising amount of press over their obviously ridiculous statement that too big to fail no longer exists. ... Read full article

Apparently part of the bank flaks' talking points regarding the foreclosure reviews is that to the extent homeowners harmed by wrongful foreclosures, they were actually drug dealers. The message: we didn't foreclose on anyone who didn't ... Read full article

Uniting my current teaching load with Dodd-Frank, over at Dealb%k . ... Read full article

Elizabeth Warren’s questioning of financial regulators at her first Senate Banking Committee hearing got a lot of attention for her pointed question about when was the last time any of their agencies had taken a large bank to trial.  It was a telling ... Read full article

Yves Smith has a pair of damning posts about the OCC foreclosure reviews ( part I and part II ). ... Read full article

Alison Frankel has a g reat column today on the fight going on between AIG and the NY Fed about who owns the securities fraud claims associated with the MBS that AIG sold to the NY Fed (or more precisely, its Maiden Lane SPV) as part of its bailout.  ... Read full article

The traditional allocation of losses at a bank was first loss bank, second loss government, but never losses to insured depositors. To wit, if Willie Sutton robs a bank, the money lost is the bank's, not that of any particular depositor.  If bank ... Read full article

An important post over at Dealbook (no, it's not by me) about the difference between the Volcker Rule and general TBTF regulation of SIFIs under Dodd-Frank. ... Read full article

If you've been tuning out the Euro situation, despite Gelpern's periodic updates , today's Times magazine has a since summary of where things stand. I also think the end of this bit nicely captures the extant cynicism regarding financial ... Read full article

The NYTimes had a very good editorial today bemoaning, with resignation, that there will not be any serious prosecutions of senior bank executives or institutions for the financial crisis.  The biggest fish to be caught was Lee Farkas. Who? That's ... Read full article

Ezra Klein has joined the melee over the Obama Administration's housing policy failure with an apologia for the Administration.  Klein argues:  The right question on housing, then, is not whether the administration’s policies proved insufficient. ... 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

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

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 Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court finally issued its long-awaited ruling in Eaton v. Fannie Mae. This case involved the question of whether a "naked mortgagee"--a mortgagee that was not also the holder of the promissory note--had standing ... 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

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James Sherk and Todd Zywicki have an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal  that kvetches about the unfairness of the Chrysler and GM bankruptcies.  As one might expect, their complaint centers upon the contention that the senior lienholders in Chrysler get 29 ... Read full article