Tag Archives: rule

Good News: The Fed Is Finally Going After Leverage in the Shadow Banking Sector

by DanteDornllauqi Posted on January 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s some welcome news. The Fed is bringing back an old tool to regulate leverage in the financial market: increased margin requirements. And in even more welcome news, these requirements will apply to everyone, not just banks:

A little-noticed global agreement recently paved the way for the central bank to move forward with plans to alter margin requirements. Under the accord announced Nov. 12, regulators representing 25 economies agreed to adopt rules similar to ones the Fed is developing, a united front intended to prevent financial firms from moving transactions offshore in response to tighter Fed rules.

….Unlike earlier Fed margin rules, which focused largely on stock purchases, the new rules being crafted by the central bank would apply to securities-financing transactions, a multitrillion dollar market involving repurchase agreements, or repos, for stocks and bonds, as well as lending of securities.

….Unlike most of the central bank’s regulatory authority, this rule would reach beyond banks and across the entire financial system, affecting investment funds and other nonbank players, reflecting the Fed’s growing concern about what has been called shadow banking.

The tighter that regulations become on banks, the more incentive there is to move transactions into the shadow banking sector.1 That’s why we need rules that apply everywhere. As we learned in 2008, a run on the shadow banking sector is every bit as dangerous as a run on ordinary banks. In fact, since shadow banks are so loosely regulated, shadow runs can be even more dangerous than normal runs.

In any case, this is basically an effort to reduce leverage in yet another corner of the financial industry. That’s a good thing. Pretty much any effort to reduce leverage in any part of the financial sector is a good thing. As I’ve mentioned before, I’d trade pretty much every financial regulation we’ve put in place since 2008 for a simpler, more robust restriction on leverage everywhere and anywhere it occurs. This stuff is boring, but it’s important.

1Commercial banks take short-term deposits and make long-term loans. They are inherently vulnerable to runs since depositors can remove their money anytime they get scared, but banks can’t just call in their loans at will in order to fund all the depositors who want their money.

A shadow bank is any entity that isn’t a commercial bank but acts just like one (borrows short, lends long). By 2008, the shadow banking sector was about as big as the ordinary commercial banking sector, and the shadow banking run in that year was responsible for a large part of the Great Meltdown.

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Good News: The Fed Is Finally Going After Leverage in the Shadow Banking Sector

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Trump Blames Obama for His Hair Problems

by AnnisWillard Posted on December 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump’s hair is not as clean as he would like, and he says it’s the president’s fault.

At a campaign event in Aiken, South Carolina, the Republican presidential front-runner was asked about the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Waters of the United States” rule, issued earlier this year. That regulation “clarifies the scope” of the kinds of bodies of water—wetlands, waterways, streams, lakes—that should be protected under the Clean Water Act. Trump expressed his displeasure at the rule, which he says has interrupted his ability to lather, rinse, and repeat.

“So I build, and I build a lot of stuff,” Trump said. “And I go into areas where they have tremendous water…And you have sinks where the water doesn’t come out. You have showers where I can’t wash my hair properly. It’s a disaster.”

The rule does not introduce any new regulations or regulatory requirements, but rather specifies the bodies of water in the United States covered under the Clean Water, which was introduced in the 1940s and then reorganized and expanded to its current form in 1972. It is unclear whether Trump’s hair-washing problems stretch back that far.

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Trump Blames Obama for His Hair Problems

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Carly Fiorina Has Found a New Dedication to the Truth. Let’s Help Her Out.

by DemetriusWhitela Posted on November 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Good news! Carly Fiorina has turned over a new leaf and now admits that she was mistaken to say that 92 percent of the jobs lost under President Obama belonged to women:

“The fact-checkers are correct,” she said….Fiorina then criticized the “liberal media” for picking apart the statistic rather than her broader argument, which was that liberal polices are bad for women economically.

“It is factually true that the number of women living in extreme poverty is at the highest rate in recorded history,” she said. “It is factually true that 16.1 percent of women live below the poverty line, the highest level in 20 years. It is factually true that 3 million women have fallen into poverty.”

This is good news for fans of factually correct statistics. And Fiorina got all of her facts right! Still, since liberal media shill Martha Raddatz1 decided not to investigate any of these facts further, I’ll go ahead and make a few wee points myself:

Fiorina only looked at the women’s poverty rate for the past 20 years. Why? Because the highest levels ever were in 1982, under Ronald Reagan, and 1992, under George H.W. Bush.
It’s true that the absolute number of women in poverty is at its highest level ever. Needless to say, this is only because the population is bigger than it was under Reagan and Bush.
The current rate of women in poverty is indeed 16.1 percent according to the Census Bureau. Does this mean that liberal policies are bad for women? Well, that number went up 3 percent during George W. Bush’s term and has (so far) gone down 0.2 percent during Barack Obama’s term. I report, you decide.2

Since Fiorina is now dedicated to getting her facts straight, I figured she’d appreciate this clarification. You’re welcome, Carly.

1You may recall her as the moderator of the vice-presidential debate in 2012, during which she pummeled Paul Ryan over and over about his fantasy budget math.

2But in case you’re having trouble deciding, the basic answer here is that poverty goes up during recessions and goes down during economic expansions. The only exceptions to this rule are under George H.W. Bush, who saw an increase starting in 1989, and George W. Bush, who oversaw in increase starting in 2006.

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Carly Fiorina Has Found a New Dedication to the Truth. Let’s Help Her Out.

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Here’s One Simple Rule For Deciding Who the Media Covers

by JayEastham Posted on October 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Paul Waldman notes today that Marco Rubio is the latest beneficiary of the media spotlight. Why?

If history is any guide, the “outsider” candidates will eventually fall, and Rubio is the only “insider” candidate whose support is going up, not down. Scott Walker is gone, Jeb Bush is struggling, and none of the other officeholders seem to be generating any interest among voters. Rubio has long had strong approval ratings among Republicans, so even those who are now supporting someone else don’t dislike him. He’s an excellent speaker both with prepared texts and extemporaneously. When you hear him talk he sounds informed and thoughtful, and much less reactionary than his actual ideas would suggest. He presents a young, Hispanic face for a party that desperately needs not to be seen as the party of old white guys.

This is all true, but it gives the media way too much credit. Here’s the rule they use for deciding who to cover:

If you’re leading or rising in the polls, you get coverage.

That’s it. All the other stuff about Rubio has been true all along, and nobody cared about him. Now he’s rising in the polls and is currently in about fourth place. So he’s getting coverage.

This happened first to Donald Trump, then to Ben Carson, then to Carly Fiorina, and now to Rubio. Bernie Sanders, oddly enough, remains fairly immune. Maybe this rule only applies to Republicans this year.

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Here’s One Simple Rule For Deciding Who the Media Covers

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Elizabeth Warren: Wall Street Just Got Another Giveaway

by AdriennLeCouteu Posted on December 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last week, Congress did Wall Street a solid. When lawmakers passed a giant spending bill that funds the government through September, they included a provision written by Citigroup lobbyists that allows banks to make more risky trades with taxpayer-insured money. Then, on Thursday, bankers got another giveaway: The Federal Reserve announced it would delay for up to two years implementation of a crucial section of the Volcker rule—one of the most important regulations to come out of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. The rule generally forbids the high-risk trading by commercial banks that helped cause the financial crisis. The move by the Fed pushes the deadline for banks to comply past the next presidential election and gives Wall Street lobbyists more time to weaken it.

“Less than a week after Wall Street slipped a bailout provision written by Citigroup into the government spending bill, the Fed has given the big banks another victory,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a statement Friday.

“It’s really hard to see an excuse for this,” says Marcus Stanley, the financial policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, an advocacy group.

The Volcker rule ensures that financial institutions don’t engage in something called proprietary trading, which is when a bank trades for its own benefit as opposed to for the benefit of its customers. Banks were supposed to comply with the Volcker rule by July 21, 2014. Last year, when banking watchdogs finalized the rule, the Fed granted banks a year-long extension. The Fed’s Thursday announcement gives banks another year to get rid of certain investments—including those in private equity firms and hedge funds. The central bank also noted Thursday that it plans to push out the deadline again next year, by another 12 months. That brings the new compliance deadline to July 2017, far past the 2016 election. If the new president is a Republican, he could fill his administration with Wall Street insiders opposed to the rule, making it even easier for lobbyists to gut it.

Before the Volcker rule was finalized last year, the financial industry fought like mad to weaken it. The regulation could slash the total annual profits of the eight largest US banks by up to $10 billion, according to an estimate by Standard & Poor’s. Banking reform advocates were fairly happy with way the final reg turned out. But now the financial industry has extra time to take a few more whacks at rule before banks actually have to obey it. “Wall Street’s loophole lawyers and other hired guns will… continue to hit at the rule as if it were a piñata,” Dennis Kelleher, the president of the financial reform advocacy group Better Markets, said when regulators completed the rule in 2013.

The Dodd-Frank law already contains a provision allowing banks that will have difficulty getting rid of particular investments before the initial compliance deadline to request an extension from banking regulators. The Fed’s announcement yesterday amounts to an unnecessary “blanket” extension, Stanley says. “It’s hogwash.”

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Elizabeth Warren: Wall Street Just Got Another Giveaway

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Bipartisan Group of 31 Senators Urges EPA To Revise RFS Proposal

by Posted on January 23, 2014

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Bipartisan Group of 31 Senators Urges EPA To Revise RFS Proposal

Posted 23 January 2014 in

National

Yesterday, a bipartisan group of 31 Senators led by Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Al Franken (D-MN), John Thune (R-SD) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) sent a letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, calling on the agency to amend its proposed 2014 Renewable Fuel Standard requirements and reaffirm its commitment to domestically produced renewable fuel.

Cutting across regional and partisan divides, the Senators raised their concerns that the EPA’s proposal would have severe, negative consequences for America’s environment, economy and national security:

Congress passed the RFS to increase the amount of renewable fuel utilized in our nation’s fuel supply. The Administration’s proposal is a significant step backward – undermining the goal of increasing biofuels production as a domestic alternative to foreign oil consumption. Further, the proposed waiver places at risk both the environmental benefits from ongoing development of advanced biofuels and rural America’s economic future. We urge you to modify your proposal.

[…]

If the rule as proposed were adopted, it will:

Replace domestic biofuel production with fossil fuels, contributing to a greater dependence on foreign sources of oil and reduce our energy security.
Increase unemployment as renewable fuel producers cut back production.
Halt investments in cellulosic, biodiesel and other advanced renewable fuels. Rolling back the RFS will, potentially strand billions of dollars of private capital;
Undermine the deployment of renewable fuels infrastructure throughout the country;
Threaten the viability of the RFS, thereby solidifying an oil-based transportation sector and lowering consumer choice at the pump.

The letter was also signed by the following Senators: Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Max Baucus (D-MT), Michael Bennet (D-CO), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Dan Coats (R-IN), Joe Donnelly (D-IN), Deb Fischer (R-NE), Tom Harkin (D-IA), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), John Hoeven (R-ND), Mike Johanns (R-NE), Tim Johnson (D-SD), Mark Kirk (R-IL), Mark Udall (D-CO), Ed Markey (D-MA), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Patty Murray (D-WA), Jack Reed (D-RI), Schatz (D-HI), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).

Click here to read the full letter [PDF].

 

 

 

 

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Bipartisan Group of 31 Senators Urges EPA To Revise RFS Proposal

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Even Doctors Believe in Obamacare’s Death Panels

by JackJanesgql Posted on December 19, 2013

Mother Jones

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I learned something new this morning. Two things, actually. First, Sarah Kliff points us to a recent study telling us that even a lot of doctors believe that Obamacare institutionalizes death panels:

This is just a survey of head and neck doctors, so maybe they’re just especially ignorant among the MD set. But probably not.

So what else did I learn? Well, Obamacare has never had death panels in the sense of the question above, but it does reimburse physicians for having end-of-life conversations with their patients. You know, so they can decide about things like DNR notices, how much extraordinary care they want, living wills, and so forth. All perfectly sensible, except that it’s what prompted the death panel nonsense in the first place.

And it’s gone. I didn’t know that. Apparently, after the New York Times put it on the front page in 2011, this provision was eliminated. So the yahoos won another victory, and it didn’t stop the death panel talk anyway. Hooray.

UPDATE: Thanks to a tweet from Austin Frakt, I did a little more digging and it turns out that a weakened version of end-of-life counseling remained in the bill and was implemented by a new regulation adopted in 2010:

The final version of the health care legislation, signed into law by President Obama in March, authorized Medicare coverage of yearly physical examinations, or wellness visits. The new rule says Medicare will cover “voluntary advance care planning,” to discuss end-of-life treatment, as part of the annual visit.

Under the rule, doctors can provide information to patients on how to prepare an “advance directive,” stating how aggressively they wish to be treated if they are so sick that they cannot make health care decisions for themselves.

So if a patient asks about end-of-life treatment, doctors are allowed to talk about it and bill the time as an office visit. Death panels!

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Even Doctors Believe in Obamacare’s Death Panels

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Here’s the Story Behind the Big Wall Street Reform Rule That Was Just Approved

by HoseaHarpur Posted on December 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, banking regulators finalized one of the most important provisions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law. It’s called the Volcker rule, and it’s supposed to prohibit the high-risk trading by commercial banks that helped cause the financial crisis. Here’s what you need to know about it.

What’s the reason for the new rule? In the run-up to the financial crisis, big banks invested in low-quality mortgage-backed securities. When those over-leveraged bets turned sour, the economy collapsed, and the government had to bail out big financial institutions. The Volcker rule ensures that banks don’t engage in what is called proprietary trading—that is, when a firm trades for its own benefit instead of trading on behalf of its customers. In May 2012, JPMorgan Chase lost $2 billion on a bad trade, which led to calls for a strong Volcker rule.

Why is it called the Volcker rule? The rule is named after Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve in the 1980s, and later an adviser to President Barack Obama. He advocated this change in financial regulation and persuaded the president to back the rule in 2010, when the Dodd-Frank bill was passed.

2010? What took so long? One reason it took three years to finish the rule is that after the legislation was passed, the actual regulation had to be crafted jointly by five banking regulators—the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). That’s a lot of coordination amongst people with different backgrounds and priorities. And during the 2012 campaign, Mitt Romney vowed to repeal Dodd-Frank. So for several months, wait-and-see regulators slowed down devising the details of the rule.

Wall Street lobbying also played a big part in delaying the unveiling of the final rule. The financial industry pushed like mad to get key loopholes into the regulation. “It’s relentless, nonstop, day and night lobbying,” Dennis Kelleher, the president of the financial reform advocacy group Better Markets, said a year ago. “It is absolute total nuclear war that Wall Street is engaged in here.” One loophole Wall Street tried to get written into the regulation would characterize certain forms of risky trading as hedging against risk. (Yes, you read that correctly.)

So who won? Kelleher says financial reformers won; these loopholes were not included. “Today’s finalization of the Volcker rule ban on proprietary trading is a major defeat for Wall Street and a direct attack on the high-risk ‘quick-buck’ culture of Wall Street,” he said in a statement. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said the rule would have prevented JPMorgan’s $2 billion trading loss last year. CFTC commissioner Bart Chilton, a fierce Wall Street critic, is happy with the rule. Former Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), one of the authors of the Dodd-Frank law, told Mother Jones today, “I have been confident all along that it would be a tough rule. I’ll make one prediction: all of the cries of doom that you’re going to hear from the financial institutions, three years from now will come to about as much validity as the cries of doom we heard about same-sex marriage.”

Obama noted, “Our financial system will be safer and the American people are more secure because we fought to include this protection in the law….I encourage Congress to give these regulators adequate funding to effectively and efficiently implement the rule, which will help protect hardworking families and business owners from future crisis, and restore everyone’s certainty and confidence in America’s dynamic financial system.”

But the success of the rule depends on how it is implemented. Marcus Stanley, the policy director at Americans for Financial reform, says that he’s “lukewarm” on the rule, mostly because a lot hangs on how it is interpreted by banking regulators who supervise compliance. “Whoever is the primary supervisor has enormous discretion about how this rule will affect trading,” he says, adding that the final Volcker rule does not include transparency provisions that would allow the public to judge whether banks are complying.

So is financial reform all finished now? No. Proprietary trading contributed to the crisis, but it was not the main cause. Regulators still have other Dodd-Frank provisions to finalize. Wall Street watchdogs have to implement plans to wind down failing banks; finish writing rules governing derivatives trading (which was largely unregulated before the financial crisis); and enforce strong requirements regarding the level of reserves banks must maintain.

What’s next? Wall Street is already preparing to fight the Volcker rule in the courts. The regulation could slash the combined annual profits of the eight largest banks by between $2 billion to $10 billion, according to Standard and Poor’s. “Wall Street’s loophole lawyers and other hired guns will… continue to hit at the rule as if it were a piñata,” Kelleher says.

Additional reporting by Patrick Caldwell.

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Here’s the Story Behind the Big Wall Street Reform Rule That Was Just Approved

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Meat industry doesn’t want to tell you where your meat comes from

by 0xo4cdr4 Posted on July 10, 2013

Meat industry doesn’t want to tell you where your meat comes from

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Where did it come from?

Multinational meat medley, anybody?

Industry groups are suing the U.S. government because they don’t want to have to tell you the origins of your meat.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture implemented new rules in May that require packages of meat to be sold with labels that identify the country in which the animal was born, raised, and slaughtered. The rules also outlaw the mixing of cuts of meat from different countries in the same package. That pleased food-safety advocates, environmentalists, and some farmers.

But it angered large meat importers and producers and grocery chains. On Tuesday, some of those groups announced they were suing to have the rules overturned. From the AP:

The American Meat Institute, a trade group for packers, processors, and suppliers, and seven other groups said segregating the meat is not part of the law Congress passed and the USDA is overstepping its authority. They also claim the rule will be costly to implement and that it offers no food safety or public health benefit.

“Segregating and tracking animals according to the countries where production steps occurred and detailing that information on a label may be a bureaucrat’s paperwork fantasy, but the labels that result will serve only to confuse consumers, raise the prices they pay, and put some producers and meat and poultry companies out of business in the process,” Mark Dopp, an AMI executive, said in a statement.

The USDA says the country of original labeling, known as COOL, will help consumers make informed decisions about the food they buy. …

Other advocates of the new rule say segregating meat will help if a food safety issue develops.

So enjoy knowing where your grocery-story beef comes from, while you can. It might soon return to being mystery meat.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Another Massey executive will go to jail for his role in the Upper Big Branch explosion

by ansonsten Posted on January 17, 2013

Another Massey executive will go to jail for his role in the Upper Big Branch explosion

By Philip Bump

A former superintendent at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine pled guilty today to his role in the 2010 explosion that killed 29 miners. From NPR:

[F]ormer Upper Big Branch coal mine superintendant Gary May was sentenced to 21 months in prison and ordered to pay a $20,000 fine. …

May pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and admitted to ordering a company electrician to disable a methane monitor on a mining machine so it could continue to cut coal without automatic shutdowns. The monitor is a safety device that senses explosive amounts of methane gas and automatically shuts down mining machines when dangerous levels of gas are present. …

May also pleaded guilty to deceiving federal mine safety inspectors and hiding safety violations.

TV 19

A sign near the Upper Big Branch mine in 2010

Last November, another Massey executive, David Craig Hughart, pled guilty to conspiracy. At the time, we speculated that his co-conspirators might include former Massey CEO Don Blankenship; now we know that the conspiracy at least included May.

What May did — basically the equivalent of shutting off a home carbon monoxide detector that kept sounding its alarm — is reprehensible. There is some belated recognition that it should also have been preventable. Shortly after the announcement of May’s plea deal, the Mine Safety and Health Administration announced a new rule that could prevent similar situations in the future.

MSHA calls it the “pattern of violations” rule and it’s supposed to identify coal mines with serious, persistent and habitual safety violations and then target them for heightened scrutiny. But MSHA failed to enforce the rule in the first 33 years of its existence, in part because of a self-imposed and cumbersome regulatory step. …

Investigators concluded that the Upper Big Branch mine qualified for preliminary “pattern of violations” (POV) status before the April, 2010, explosion. But regulators failed to apply the rule, blaming a “computer glitch” that has never fully been explained.

The revised rule eliminates preliminary steps so that regulators will have a much easier time citing and sanctioning habitual violators of serious safety standards. The new rule also triggers automatic and immediate shutdowns of mining areas if serious and substantial violations are found in mines with POV status.

Unsurprisingly, those mining industry executives who have not pled guilty to conspiracy charges spoke out against the tightened rule. From The Hill:

The National Mining Association (NMA) panned the rule, saying MSHA ignored the group’s concerns about the rule. Among them is the loss of mine operators’ due process when responding to a violation notice.

“Because any unsafe conditions must be remedied under current regulations, no miner is put in harm’s way if a citation is appealed,” the NMA said in a written statement. “As such, the loss of due process rights serves no safety objective.”

The group said some operators would unjustifiably be found in a pattern of violation, with little recourse.

It could be worse.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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