Too Big to Fail (TBTF)

Senator Elizabeth Warren surprised a lot of people by laying 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 communicated in it. Senator Warren's comments can basically be translated as follows:  

The data breach stories just don't seem to stop. (And why would they?). The latest (I think) is about a massive and sophisticated multi-million dollar hacking of several banks.  If you read down through the story, one of the things the hackers did was manipulate the balances of real accounts.  They'd change a real $1,000 balance to $10,000 and then have $9,000 wired to an account at another institution.  

Last month mortgage servicer Ocwen (that's NewCo backwards) was mauled by the NY State Department of Financial Services. Now the California Department of Corporations is seeking to revoke Ocwen's license to do business in that state. 

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 Dodd-Frank Act, which prohibits bailouts of swap entities and pushes certain types of particularly risky swaps out of insured depositories. Section 716 might be thought of as the "Banks Aren't Casinos" provision of Dodd-Frank.