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the widening financial gyre
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, (from...
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everybody wants to rule the world
Possibly my two favorite things are 80s music and Goldman Sachs-related grandiosity. So, a combo is a special treat. We have them together with the BBC-broadcasted-boastings of independent trader...
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we heard it from three people, so it must be true
In yesterday’s New York Times, Joe Nocera incisively attacked the persistent falsehood that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were “ground zero” for the financial crisis. In “An Inconvenient Truth,” Nocera...
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pareto redux
To anyone who has noticed that theParetoCommons has been dormant during the past six months I owe an explanation for the hiatus and my thanks for bothering to read this post after so much time....
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has the great big bank die off begun?
Bob Diamond and Jamie Dimon are two of the best bankers America has ever produced, and JP Morgan Chase and Barclays are among the great banks of the world. These facts might be lost in the current...
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the operational hazards of everyday banking
The Irish Times is running a story today that provides a perfect example of why large, highly interconnected financial institutions can unexpectedly become very dangerous. Titled “Ulster Bank counts...
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holding out for holder to prosecute libor liars
“Tim Geithner had evidence of a financial crime of epic proportion — so he wrote a memo,” quipped Charles Gasparino in the New York Post yesterday. This one-sentence observation of Geithner’s inaction...
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the proverbial really does happen
Less than a month ago I discussed the disaster being experienced by the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and its Irish subsidiary as a result of a software installation screwup. For RBS the nightmare...
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so why is no one in jail?
In the aftermath of the Savings & Loan (S&L) crisis of the 1980s, there were over 1800 criminal prosecutions and more than a thousand financial executives went to prison. So far the financiers...
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you can’t fight complexity with complexity
Andy Haldane’s speech at Jackson Hole today, The Dog and the Frisbee, is the single best speech by a regulator or financier anywhere in 2012. It is a splendid application of complexity science to the...
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nailing naked nonsense
Teaching and research distractions have again kept me from blogging for a while. I guess my defense is that learning the facts is always an important precursor to writing about them. This morning,...
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thirteen ways of looking at a whale
Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird came to mind Friday while watching bankers and regulators testify before the Senator Levin-lead bipartisan subcommittee hearing on “JPMorgan...
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are we there yet? mapping progress on the third anniversary of dodd-frank
Three years after President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act on July 21, 2010, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who believes the job of restoring...
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volcker rule: a tall order and a small victory
Today’s vote to approve the long-awaited Volcker rule marks a small victory in the ongoing battle to end Too Big to Fail (TBTF). Generally speaking, this new rule will restrict banks from gambling with...
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