Tag Archives: financial

GOP to Give Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Protection Agency the Darrell Issa Treatment

by Shayna9349 Posted on January 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ever since Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) helped get the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau off the ground in 2010, Republicans have been trying to shut it down. GOPers drafted legislation to weaken the fledgling agency, which was designed to prevent mortgage lenders, credit card companies, and other financial institutions from screwing average Americans. The measures died. Republicans turned to the courts to gut the bureau. That effort failed. Now that Republicans control both houses of Congress, they have another weapon at their disposal: new subpoena powers they can deploy to blitz the CFPB with document requests.

The goal is obvious: dig out material the GOPers can use to embarrass the agency. And if nothing untoward is discovered, Republican legislators can at least pin down the bureau with onerous paperwork demands. Democrats fear Republicans’ new information-gathering abilities will make it easier for the agency’s foes to launch witch-hunt style investigations of the CFPB similar to those former House oversight committee chair Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) launched regarding Benghazi and the IRS.

All committees in both the House and the Senate have the right to subpoena federal agencies for information. But until recently, either the most senior committee member from the minority party had to sign off on a subpoena or the entire committee had to vote on the request. In the last Congress, six House committees okayed a rule change giving the committee chair unilateral subpoena power. On Tuesday, the House financial services committee—which has jurisdiction over the CFPB—voted along party lines to grant the same privilege to its Republican chairman, Jeb Hensarling of Texas.

Republicans already have a track record of looking for information that could tarnish the CFPB’s reputation, and Democrats fully expect Hensarling to continue down the same path. And now Hensarling, a fierce CFPB critic, will be able to more easily mount politically motivated investigations of the agency.

Without the rule change, GOPers could still push through the subpoenas. As the majority, Republicans on the committee could vote to approve an information request. But with its new subpoena superpowers, the committee can demand records without a vote—and, thus, can keep the process from the public eye, a spokesman for the committee Democrats says. No longer will there be a public hearing where lawmakers can debate the subpoenas and Democrats can make a case if they think Hensarling and the Republicans are abusing the privilege. Last year, for example, ranking Democratic member Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) used the public forum to convince Hensarling to back down on a Treasury Department subpoena.

Now, if Democrats want to keep GOPers from going on a fishing expedition aimed at tarnishing the CFPB, they won’t have as much of an opportunity to create a ruckus. At a committee hearing Tuesday, Waters, the senior Democrat on the panel, called the rules change “anti-democratic” and “insulting.” (Under the new rule, Waters will be given 48 hours notice before Hensarling issues a subpoena, so that she can alert the press if she wants.)

“We think it’s ridiculous that the Republican leadership is exporting the Issa model to the rest of the House,” a Democratic staffer told Politico. Several other House committees are expected to approve similar powers for their chairs this month.

Last year the GOP-dominated financial services committee voted to subpoena three CFPB officials to require them to testify in an ongoing investigation of alleged discrimination against minorities and women at the bureau. Democrats claimed the move was politically motivated.

Hensarling has not yet indicated how he might use the new subpoena powers. Some Republicans are unhappy with the CFPB’s plan to crack down on shady payday lenders, so Hensarling could potentially subpoena the data the agency is collecting in an attempt to prove the effort is overly invasive. Hensarling denies the new rule is undemocratic.

The CFPB did not respond to a request for comment.

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GOP to Give Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Protection Agency the Darrell Issa Treatment

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Chart of the Day: Obamacare Just Keeps Working, and Working, and Working….

by KristopEdc Posted on January 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last year, as Obamacare finally went into full effect, the ranks of the uninsured began to drop sharply. Despite all the website problems and the repeated predictions of doom from conservatives, it turned out that Obamacare was working well. Then things stabilized as open enrollment ended. Today, Gallup released new results for the final quarter of 2014, which marked the start of Obamacare’s second year of enrollment, and guess what? The ranks of the uninsured are dropping yet again. The percentage of adults without health insurance dropped from 13.4 percent to 12.9 percent:

The Affordable Care Act has accomplished one of its goals: increasing the percentage of Americans who have health insurance coverage. The uninsured rate as measured by Gallup has dropped 4.2 points since the requirement to have health insurance or pay a fine went into effect. It will likely drop further as plans purchased during the current open enrollment period take effect. The Department of Health and Human Services reported that 6.5 million Americans either selected new plans or were automatically re-enrolled into a plan via HealthCare.gov as of Dec. 26, 2014.

….Other signs also point to the uninsured rate falling more after this open enrollment period ends. HHS continues to focus on the financial assistance available to enrollees and increasing the fine for not having health insurance….The uninsured rate could also fall further as more states expand Medicaid.

The uninsurance rate has dropped the most among blacks, Hispanics, the young, and the poor. It’s dropped by only a small amount among the middle classes, since they’re mostly insured already by their employers. But even right smack in the middle, uninsurance rates have dropped by three percentage points. Obamacare just keeps on working, and it’s working for everyone.

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Chart of the Day: Obamacare Just Keeps Working, and Working, and Working….

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World Leaders Cobbled Together a Last-Minute Climate Deal in Peru. Here’s What Happens Next.

by Herbert7219 Posted on December 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Climate negotiators from nearly 200 countries are on their way home from Lima, Peru, after a series of last-minute compromises produced an agreement that, for the first time, calls on all countries to develop plans to limit their greenhouse gas emissions.

As the two weeks of global warming talks drew to a close, familiar fault lines emerged between wealthy countries—which are disproportionately responsible for causing climate change—and developing countries, which will be disproportionately impacted by it. In the end, both sides made sacrifices. Developing nations failed to convince the United States other economic powerhouses to commit cash to fund climate adaptation efforts around the world. And the US lost a battle over a one-word change that made guidelines for countries’ climate commitments optional instead of mandatory. As a result, the agreement came out weaker than climate hawks had hoped for, because countries get plenty of wiggle room to potentially scale back their promises.

“I would say that whereas at the end of last week, the draft agreement was close to unambiguously positive, over the weekend it did get watered down,” said Harvard environmental economist Robert Stavins. (You can read his more detailed analysis here).

So what happens now? The Lima agreement is essentially a playbook for diplomacy in the run-up to next December’s major global warming talks in Paris, where countries will meet in an attempt to finalize the world’s first universal climate accord. Before that can happen, there’s still a whole lot of negotiating left on the table, at both the domestic and international levels.

First, every country is now supposed to come up with its plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, like the joint plan announced last month by the US and China. Guidelines for what those plans must include are pretty loose, but in most cases they’ll lay out an emissions reduction target, a timeline for reaching it, and a series of domestic policy measures to achieve it. The Lima agreement requires that the plans be more aggressive than a “business-as-usual” scenario.

The plans can also (but aren’t required to) include commitments for low-carbon economic development, pledges of financial assistance for developing countries, or really whatever else a country feels like sticking in there. Those plans are due to the UN climate committee no later than October 1.

Once every country has submitted its contribution, the UN will conduct an analysis of how far they go, collectively, toward slowing climate change. This will be like a report card grading the actual impact the Paris agreement is likely to have. Expect that by November.

At the same time, negotiators will be tinkering away on nearly 40 pages of draft text that will serve as an introduction to the patchwork of national contributions (see the “Annex” here). There are smaller meetings early in 2015—first in Bonn, Germany, and then in Geneva, Switzerland—where this will be the main task at hand. That document will be presented in May, then tweaked and (fingers crossed) finally approved in Paris.

Stay tuned over the next several months for commitments from key players like India, Russia, and Australia.

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World Leaders Cobbled Together a Last-Minute Climate Deal in Peru. Here’s What Happens Next.

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Citigroup Wrote the Wall Street Giveaway Congress Just Snuck Into a Must-Pass Spending Bill

by BethBolendjcmjr Posted on December 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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A year ago, Mother Jones reported that a House bill that would allow banks like Citigroup to do more high-risk trading with taxpayer-backed money was written almost entirely by Citigroup lobbyists. The bill passed the House in October 2013, but the Senate never voted on it. For months, it was all but dead. Yet on Tuesday night, the Citi-written bill resurfaced. Lawmakers snuck the measure into a massive 11th-hour government funding bill that congressional leaders negotiated in the hopes of averting a government shutdown. President Barack Obama is expected to sign the legislation.

“This is outrageous,” says Marcus Stanley, the financial policy director at the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform. “This is to benefit big banks, bottom line.”

As I reported last year, the bill eviscerates a section of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act called the “push-out rule”:

Banks hate the push-out rule…because this provision will forbid them from trading certain derivatives (which are complicated financial instruments with values derived from underlying variables, such as crop prices or interest rates). Under this rule, banks will have to move these risky trades into separate non-bank affiliates that aren’t insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and are less likely to receive government bailouts. The bill would smother the push-out rule in its crib by permitting banks to use government-insured deposits to bet on a wider range of these risky derivatives.

The Citi-drafted legislation will benefit five of the largest banks in the country—Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo. These financial institutions control more than 90 percent of the $700 trillion derivatives market. If this measure becomes law, these banks will be able to use FDIC-insured money to bet on nearly anything they want. And if there’s another economic downturn, they can count on a taxpayer bailout of their derivatives trading business.

In May 2013, the New York Times reported that Citigroup’s proposed language was reflected in more than 70 lines of the House financial services committee’s 85-line bill. Mother Jones was the first to publish the document showing that Citigroup lobbyists had drafted most of the legislation. Here is a side-by-side of a key section of the House bill:

The bill—sponsored by two Dems and two Republicans—passed easily out of the House financial services committee on a 53-6 vote. The six no votes came from Democrats. In October 2013, the measure passed the Republican-controlled House 292-122. Seventy Dems voted in favor, but that was far fewer than expected, partly due to press coverage of Citi’s involvement in the bill’s drafting.

Back then, the bill’s chances of becoming law seemed dim. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew voiced his opposition to the measure, saying it would be “disruptive and harmful.” Obama signaled to lawmakers that he opposed it. It never came up for a vote in the Senate.

And the legislation was left on the table for corporate-friendly lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to now sneak into the pending spending bill. But Democratic leadership is raising concerns about the Wall Street-friendly provision. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) blasted out a statement Wednesday morning slamming the provision for allowing “big banks to gamble with money insured by the FDIC.” And Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is calling on the House to strike the Citi-written language from the spending bill.

“I am disgusted,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House financial services committee, said in a statement. “Congress is risking our homes, jobs and retirement savings once again.”

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) issued an even more dire warning, calling the bill “a good example of capitalism’s death wish.”

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Citigroup Wrote the Wall Street Giveaway Congress Just Snuck Into a Must-Pass Spending Bill

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Elizabeth Warren Doesn’t Like This Treasury Nominee. Here’s Why.

by Bonita43Wdvs Posted on December 5, 2014

Mother Jones

Last year, liberal darling Sen. Elizabeth Warren helped doom President Barack Obama’s effort to nominate former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to head the Federal Reserve. Now the Democratic senator from Massachusetts is leading the charge to derail another Wall Street-friendly Obama nominee: investment banker Antonio Weiss. Last month, the president tapped Weiss to become the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for domestic finance, a position with immense power over big banks. If confirmed, consumer advocates fear, Weiss may not go to bat for average Americans while helping craft banking rules and battling Republican-led efforts to gut financial reform.

Weiss’ job at Treasury would include overseeing the implementation of Wall Street reforms and consumer protection measures. He would help shape banking rules that the Treasury Department and other financial regulators must finalize over the next two years. And he would be in the room with congressional leaders and administration officials negotiating over GOP proposals that would water down financial reforms.

Weiss has spent the past 20 years at Lazard, an asset management firm that advises companies on mergers and acquisitions. He is now the firm’s head of investment banking. Warren contends that Weiss is not the right man for the job because he has no experience in banking regulation and is too cozy with the financial sector. And she is leading the effort to take him down. In November, Warren vowed to vote against Weiss’ confirmation, and her political operation blasted out an email ginning up opposition to him. In an op-ed in the Huffington Post last month, she said the Weiss nomination “tells people that whatever goes wrong in this economy, the Wall Street banks will be protected first.”

A source familiar with the administration’s thinking says that Weiss’ background does not determine what policy positions he may take if confirmed. But since he has little regulatory experience and most of his relationships are with people in finance, a Democratic aide tells Mother Jones, those are the people he will likely listen to.

A White House spokeswoman declined to comment on how Weiss’ connections to Wall Street might conflict with his mandate to protect consumers, noting only that “Antonio Weiss is a highly qualified nominee and we look forward to the Senate’s consideration of his nomination and swift confirmation.” Weiss did not respond to a request for comment.

Weiss will have a long to-do list if he’s confirmed. Not only would he weigh in on banking rules, he would also advise the president on whether to compromise with Republican efforts to modify the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill. (Obama will veto any all-out attack on Dodd-Frank, but Republicans could slip smaller measures to water it down into larger pieces of legislation that must get passed.) Here are some of the issues that could come across Weiss’ desk:

One of the bills that might pass the Republican-controlled Congress in the next two years would gut new restrictions on private equity fund advisers. Weiss’ current firm, Lazard, runs two private equity funds. The administration source counters that this area of the company’s business is separate from the investment banking work Weiss does.
Another bill that has already passed the House would weaken a section of Dodd-Frank that requires more oversight of derivatives trading. (Derivatives are financial products whose value is based on things like currency exchange rates and crop prices.)
The Financial Stability Oversight Council, chaired by Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, is looking into whether asset management firms like Lazard should be subject to tighter regulations. Weiss would serve in an advisory role on this matter.

The administration source says that Weiss’ résumé does not mean that he would work to weaken rules on the financial industry. The source adds that if Weiss is confirmed, he would no longer have ties to his former employer; ethics rules require that he divest his holdings or put his investments in a blind trust.

Weiss’ defenders—including Gene Sperling, a former senior economic policy maker in both the Obama and Clinton White Houses, and Neera Tanden, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress—say that his policy stances largely line up with Warren’s positions. He has called for higher taxes on the rich and a more progressive tax code. Treasury Secretary Lew told the New York Times last month that Weiss opposes US companies moving overseas to avoid domestic taxation—even though his firm has helped companies do just that.

That hasn’t mollified Warren and the crew of progressives she has lined up behind her. Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have also formally declared their opposition to Weiss.

Warren’s anti-Weiss broadside is just the latest in her battle to push the Democratic party to the left. “This is not at all about Antonio Weiss,” Steve Rattner, an investment banker who worked on the 2009 auto industry bailout, told Politico on Wednesday. “It is part of a much broader narrative of the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party and whether so-called progressives are going to capture that or whether more mainstream Democrats…are going to retain it.”

Weiss’ confirmation process likely won’t get going until after Republicans take control of the Senate in January. He may be able to win confirmation with largely Republican votes.

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Elizabeth Warren Doesn’t Like This Treasury Nominee. Here’s Why.

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Elizabeth Warren to Banks: Prove You Can Protect Customer Data From Hackers

by Gustavo Stanfield Posted on November 19, 2014

Mother Jones

Elizabeth Warren is off to a running start in her new leadership role with the Senate Democratic caucus. She called out Walmart for its terrible labor practices. She wrote an op-ed this week warning the president against appointing Wall Street insiders to the Federal Reserve. And Tuesday morning, she called on financial institutions to prove that they can protect customer data from cybercriminals.

Over the past year, cyber attackers have stolen roughly 500 million records from financial institutions, according to federal law enforcement officials. In a joint letter also signed by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), Warren asked 16 firms—including Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley—for detailed information about cyber attacks they experienced over the past year and how they plan to prevent future breaches.

“The increasing number of cyberattacks and data breaches is unprecedented and poses a clear and present danger to our nation’s economic security,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter. “Each successive cyberattack and data breach not only results in hefty costs and liabilities for businesses, but exposes consumers to identity theft and other fraud, as well as a host of other cyber-crimes.”

Warren and Cummings requested the firms provide information on the number of customers that may have been affected by breaches, data security measures the companies have taken in response, the value of the fraudulent transactions connected with the cyber attacks, and who is suspected to have carried them out. The letters also request that IT security officers at each firm brief the lawmakers on how they are protecting their data from cybervillains.

The lawmakers hope to use the information the firms provide to inform new federal cybersecurity legislation. Current cybersecurity law is unclear about when companies are required to notify the government about a data hack. Warren has previously called on Congress to give the Federal Trade Commission more power to regulate data breaches.

The American financial sector is one of the most targeted in the world, according to the FBI and Secret Service officials. The hackers who stole data from JPMorgan Chase earlier this year—compromising information from 76 million households—also targeted 13 other financial institutions, Bloomberg reported last month.

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Elizabeth Warren to Banks: Prove You Can Protect Customer Data From Hackers

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Happy Halloween From Mitch McConnell and Friends

by EdnaBloomfield Posted on October 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Republican lawmakers have been getting in the holiday spirit today by reminding people about their longstanding beef with Obamacare. Senate Republicans put out a list of articles on their website under the headlines “Spooked by higher costs” and “All tricks, no treats”.

Oh, there’s also a video floating around from the Republican-controlled House Financial Services committee. You can watch it below. It’s really, really not scary:

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Happy Halloween From Mitch McConnell and Friends

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Elizabeth Warren: The Feds Are Far Too “Cozy” With Wall Street

by MaricruMusselma Posted on October 1, 2014

Mother Jones

Pointing to recently leaked audio recordings between officials at the Federal Reserve and Goldman Sachs bankers, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is slamming regulators for being far too timid and compliant when it comes to laying down the law with big banks.

“Well, ultimately this report tells us exactly what we already knew — that the relationship between regulators and the financial institutions they oversee is too cozy to provide the kind of tough oversight that’s really needed,” Warren said in an interview with NPR.

“We can keep making the rules tougher and tougher, but it won’t make an ounce of difference if the regulators won’t enforce the rules that are there,” she added. “If the regulators back down or back off whenever the banks tell them to, then it’s the banks—and not the regulators—who are running the show.”

While the secret recordings, which were captured by former bank examiner for the Federal Reserve Carmen Segarra, do not expose any flagrant wrongdoing by either side, they do reveal an uncomfortable, wholly inappropriate eagerness to please Goldman Sachs. And let’s keep in mind Segarra’s secret tapes were recorded in 2012, at least four solid years after the financial crisis.

After This American Life and ProPublica jointly released the tapes last week, Warren and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) have also called for a federal investigation into the dealings of the New York Federal Reserve.

The New York Fed has since “categorically rejected” the accusations, but Warren tells NPR the public needs more individuals like Segerra who are willing to speak up against institutions deemed “too big to fail.”

“We need to look at whether or not we’ve got the right tools to protect the kind of people who will speak up. But, but what we’ve got to start with is we’ve got to expose what happened here, we’ve got to look at what the available tools are, but we’ve got to give the message loud and clear to the Fed: Um, this isn’t gonna work — you work for the American people, you don’t work for the big banks.”

Originally posted here – 

Elizabeth Warren: The Feds Are Far Too “Cozy” With Wall Street

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Staten Island Zoo Capitalizes on the Small and Obscure

by Myrna Posted on August 1, 2014

Since the acquisition of diminutive and lesser-known creatures like the Patagonian cavy and the cassowary, zoo attendance has risen. View post –  Staten Island Zoo Capitalizes on the Small and Obscure ; ;Related ArticlesWhite House Pushes Financial Case for Carbon RuleDot Earth Blog: Fresh Focus on Siberian Permafrost as Hole Count RisesSuit Says Owl Killings at Kennedy Airport Were Excessive ;

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Staten Island Zoo Capitalizes on the Small and Obscure

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The IRS Scandal Finally Reaches Its End Game

by Lucia67Nhv Posted on July 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Every few years the Republican Party goes on a jihad against the IRS. The most famous was probably Sen. William Roth’s theatrical witch hunt in the 90s that regaled an eager public with stories about jackbooted thugs and “Gestapo-like” tactics. The most recent is the seemingly endless investigation into charges that the IRS targeted grassroots conservative nonprofits at the behest of its partisan masters. These charges have turned out to be almost entirely groundless—just like Roth’s—but don’t make the mistake of thinking this makes them pointless. You just have to wait for the other shoe to drop, as it did yesterday:

The House late Monday night adopted proposals by voice vote to cut funding for the Internal Revenue Service. Rep. Paul Gosar’s (R-Ariz.) amendment to the fiscal 2015 Financial Services appropriations bill would cut funding for the IRS by $353 million. Specifically, Gosar’s amendment would cut that funding from the IRS enforcement account and use it toward deficit reduction.

Gosar argued that funding for the IRS would be better used toward reducing the deficit than toward the agency caught in GOP crosshairs….”More directly than financial or condition of the country is the fact that this agency has shown contempt for the American taxpayer.”

The Roth Hearings ended up with reduced funding for IRS enforcement, something that took over a decade to recover from. Now Gosar wants to reduce IRS enforcement funding too. Coincidence? Not so much. If you want to reduce taxes on the wealthy, after all, there are two ways to do it. You can either reduce their tax rates or you can make it easier for them to evade the tax rates that already exist. Either way, it’s a boon to anyone with lots of money and good tax planners. But I repeat myself.

In any case, this was always inevitable. The goal of anti-IRS jihads is always to reduce funding for enforcement. And despite what Gosar might want you to believe, very little enforcement has ever been aimed at middle-class taxpayers or small nonprofits. It’s mostly aimed at the rich, for obvious Willie Suttonish reasons. Weakening enforcement actions against the Republican Party’s core constituency has always been the end game for the IRS scandal, and now we’re finally there.

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The IRS Scandal Finally Reaches Its End Game

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