Blog Entries tagged 'kcates'

Consumer protection agency would burden banks? Precisely.

karlcates@verizon.net — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 23:00:00 +0100

For better or for worse, the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency - already being shrunk in Washington shorthand to CFPA - would create another level of government bureaucracy.

Its advocates have a two-word response: "So what?"

If the agency, as its supporters envision it, burdens the banking industry with another set of rules and enforcement, oh well, mission accomplished! On Thursday, however, came sudden word that the Obama administration is willing to [...]

On banking reform, a bipartisan sighting

karlcates@verizon.net — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 23:00:00 +0100

So maybe we're not such a purple nation, after all. Red is red and blue is blue and they're not mixing, especially if you're using bipartisanship in Washington as a gauge. Regulatory reform of banks is a good example. The party in power would if it could resurrect Glass-Steagall, but that's not going to happen unless they rewrite the rules of the Senate and grant simple majority rule.

And they're not going to rewrite the rules, which is why reform has pl [...]

The often-underestimated Internet-driven backlash

karlcates@verizon.net — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:00:00 +0100

In what seemed at first blush a weird collision between lowbrow Internet and high-n-mighty government agency, the Federal Depository Insurance Corporation has been busy doing damage control on a YouTube video.

That the FDIC is responding at all to something on YouTube is news in itself, illustrating how Web-based backlashes have grown in influence. Grass-roots Internet campaigns - or those that advertise themselves as grass-roots campaigns - are a throwback to the pamphlete [...]

Tinker, Tailor, Computer Programmer, Spy

karlcates@verizon.net — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 23:00:00 +0100

Okay, as far as I know Sergey Aleynikov isn't a tinker or a tailor. But he is a computer programmer, and prosecutors say he's a spy as well.

In an indictment unsealed the other day in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Aleynikov is accused of ripping off Goldman Sachs by spiriting away some of its magic formula. I know, the idea of somebody ripping off Goldman may only draw shouts of Robin-Hood glee, but prosecutors say it's not quite like that and that Ale [...]

A daring rate increase by a big insurance company

karlcates@verizon.net — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 23:00:00 +0100

In the you've-gotta-be-kidding-me category of recent news comes word that WellPoint, the big California health-insurance company, wants to increase rates by 39 percent.

To be fair, the company pointed out in a letter on Thursday to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the increase only affects customers who aren't members of group plans and have to buy their own insurance. Still, that's 800,000 people. To be fair again, the company says [...]

Snow day: an affirmation of the value in telecommuting

karlcates@verizon.net — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:00:00 +0100

As a blizzard blitzes the East Coast today, millions of workers sit home idle and trapped by a vagary of Mother Nature that provokes the National Weather Service to post no-travel warnings.

The economic cost of this standstill is anybody's guess, but to get a sense of the impact, consider how the federal government is in its third consecutive day of work stoppage because of the one-two weather punch the Washington, D.C., area has endured this month. And yet, as (the) US [...]

The CFO Nightmare Before Easter

karlcates@verizon.net — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:00:00 +0100

As professional horrors go, they probably don't get a whole lot more unsettling than Joe L. Price's.

Price, the former CFO at Bank of America, must be tossing and turning lately, what with the attorney general of New York naming him personally last week in a lawsuit over the bank's handling of the ugly Merrill Lynch acquisition/investor-subsidized bailout/compensation party in late 2008.

Now, Price and former BofA CEO Ken Lewis face another unpleasa [...]

The financial crisis: a silver lining for IT?

karlcates@verizon.net — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:00:00 +0100

Look around a little bit and you find a horde of anticipation that corporate spending on technology - after a painful slump in 2009 - is destined for a rebound in this New Year, almost 10 percent spent already. Yesterday's banner headline in the WSJ trumpeted the news that Cisco Systems was hiring 3,000 people to keep pace with a surge in demand. The significance of the story came mostly from Cisco's stature as a harbinger of things to come.

That was before the Dow d [...]

Chris Dodd is acting like a bank lobbyist

karlcates@verizon.net — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:00:00 +0100

Chris Dodd's scolding of the Obama administration on Tuesday for wanting to do "too much" to restore banking regulation sent me into a short trance and a vision of the future: Dodd as banking lobbyist.

Here's the Dodd quote if you don't believe it: "I don't want to be in a position where we end up doing nothing because we tried to do too much."

It's an outlandish supposition, one may say, to have the chairman of the esteemed Senate Banking C [...]

Naked came the swap

karlcates@verizon.net — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:00:00 +0100

Ever read "Naked Came the Stranger," that 1969 hoax in which a bunch of newspaper literati got together anonymously and wrote a terrible pulp novel with gratuitous sex and betrayal as a send-up of bad popular fiction? Me either, but it was a huge hit and its writers were said to have been simultaneously sickened and enriched.

Naked credit-default swaps are also kind of sickening but clearly those who dabble in them aren't put off by the stench. The good news is tha [...]