"Subprime auto lenders are showing up in a lot of personal bankruptcy filings."

Hey, who’s up for burying consumers in ridiculous loans and selling them off as securities on Wall Street?  I mean, it’s not as is this has worked out badly in the past, is it?  Well, okay, it didn’t work out so well when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pulled this stunt with home loans, but [...]

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Hmm.

In a letter to his shareholders on Monday, General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt warned that the many incoming federal regulations and the accompanying “unprecedented” uncertainty could have an unfortunate impact on capital investment and the general American economy. You don’t say, via CNBC: “The amount of regulation tends to grow during periods of financial strain [...]

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"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

Just to clarify, “protection,” in the Obama-administration context, is hereafter joining my list of words that deserve to be indelibly surrounded by quotation marks (re: “investments”). The Consumer Financial “Protection” Bureau is all set to hit the ground running with bright-eyed regulatory gusto in 2013, now that they have finally worked through some of the [...]

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Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Twice per year, the federal government is required to release a unified agenda of all of the “economically significant” rules and regulations that all departments and agencies plan to pursue in the coming year. Such pesky exactions hardly need apply to The Most Transparent Administration Evah, of course, and the Obama administration had mysteriously neglected [...]

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Protection from the protectors?

While we’re slowly but surely seeing all of the ‘unexpected’ surprises of ObamaCare unfold, President Obama’s other crowning legislative achievement — the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act — is simultaneously being written out as well. Most unfortunately, the massive bureaucratic agenda being implemented by Dodd-Frank doesn’t seem to be producing rules and [...]

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"Fairness."

Businesses offer valuable goods and services in a marketplace, not out of philanthropy, but out of a desire to make money — which is great for consumers, because different businesses compete to supply our wants and needs and obtain our voluntary patronage at an efficient price. Specifically, we all use banks, credit unions, etcetera because [...]

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Elections have consequences.

Nothing that anyone who pays attention doesn’t know already, but a point to which I intend to give unrelenting attention as we move “forward” into the next four years of an Obama economy. It is an indescribable shame that what America needs more than anything else right now is a robust rate of positive economic [...]

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Business as usual.

Obama’s second term means the leviathan legislative packages of ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank are indeed going to survive fully intact and are now preparing to rule over the health care and financial industries with an iron regulatory fist… and it’s not going to pretty. From the Associated Press: Financial stocks in the Standard & Poor’s 500 [...]

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Unbelievable.

Our president made his fifth visit to the “Tonight” show with Jay Leno on Wednesday evening, and for me, one of the most painful moments of the interview came when the president yet again paraded his woefully inept and downright disquieting economic sensibilities by once more heaping blame on Everybody’s Favorite Financial Crisis Scapegoat, big [...]

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I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.

I’ve yet to resolve my quandary over which of President Obama’s signature legislative ‘achievements’ I find more distasteful — ObamaCare, or Dodd-Frank. Yes, ObamaCare boasts the audacity of stomping on individual freedom, taking over an entire economic sector that particularly cannot afford to have its works gummed up by bureaucratic inefficiency (since there are actual [...]

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So far.

Want an insight on why we’re experiencing the worst recovery since the Great Depression?  The US Chamber of Commerce points out that the Code of Federal Regulations has grown at a pace outstripping economic growth — and especially job creation — during the Barack Obama administration, expanding by 7.4%, with a good part of that [...]

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Populism. So much populism.

I just can’t hold my peace on self-styled champion of financial reform Elizabeth Warren’s speech at the DNC Wednesday night — it pains me far too deeply. Behold, this is what intellectually cheap populism looks like, in all its utterly vapid glory. Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren railed against an enterprise system “rigged” against the [...]

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“The economic situation obviously is far from satisfactory."

Fed chair Ben Bernanke stopped just short of calling for a third round of quantitative easing in a speech this morning, but there isn’t much mystery now as to whether the Fed will intervene.  The only question is when: The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, delivered on Friday a detailed and forceful argument for [...]

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Rationalizing rationality.

Blergh. It appears that federal regulators have recently required that the five largest American banks — Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase — need to come up with “recovery plans” in the event of fiscal calamity, and the plans should be careful not to rely on public-sector help. …Gee, ya’ [...]

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More housing-market messes.

I realize I already discussed this moment in an earlier post, but there are just so many juicy ways to interpret it — I hope you’ll forgive me for being unable to resist the temptation to use it just once more. At a campaign event in Ohio last week, President Obama lectured the crowd about [...]

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Harry Reid: "Angry old white men" are trying to buy the election.

During the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama was big finance’s favorite candidate by a long shot. Perhaps hoping to put a more Bill Clinton-esque Democrat in the White House (didn’t exactly work out that way, did it?), Wall Street poured money into the Democrats’ fundraising machines: Despite his rhetorical attacks on Wall [...]

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Excellent.

With every fiber of my being, I detest the woefully-orchestrated, unbearably intrusive disaster of a legislative package that is the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. It is the federal government’s attempt at blaming “big banks” and “Wall Street” as the main perpetrators of the financial crisis (instead of big government itself), and [...]

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Using the rules Congress sets for everyone else.

What would happen if Congress had to apply the regulations in Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank, and other corporate accounting law to its own balance sheets?  Instead of talking about trillion-dollar deficits, USA Today reports from its analysis, we’d be talking about five times that amount: The typical American household would have paid nearly all of its income [...]

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... ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank?

Will Team Obama run on the President’s record, or from it?  In their new 60-second ad “Go,” aimed at swing states, the Obama campaign tries to sell voters on Barack Obama’s accomplishments in his term in office.  However, a couple of omissions are rather telling: “We’re certainly running on our record,” senior Obama strategist David [...]

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Plus, the intellectual bankruptcy of the Obama administration.

And that’s just the start.  The House Financial Services Committee will roll out a report today showing that less than half of the required rule-making for the Dodd-Frank bill passed two years ago has been completed, but just the first 46% already comprises more than 5300 pages of rules: Texas Republican Rep. Randy Neugebauer, the [...]

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Priorities.

More than two years ago, Barack Obama railed against “too big to fail” banks and pledged to prevent the “further consolidation” of the banking system.  Did Obama succeed?  According to Bloomberg, the five banks that held assets equal to 43% of the US economy in 2007 before the financial crisis and the bank bailout now [...]

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Tool time.

When Senate Republicans blocked the confirmation of Richard Cordray to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, they did so in protest of the ambiguous and open-ended power granted to CFPB by the previous Democratic-controlled Congress.  Barack Obama blasted Republicans for obstructionism, defended Cordray as a mainstream, responsible choice to lead the CFPB, and gave him [...]

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One way or another, consumers will pay.

The Senate this afternoon defeated an amendment to delay the implementation of a controversial rule to regulate debit-card-related fees. It needed 60 votes to pass and received just 54, with 45 senators opposing. Because the amendment failed, the new rule will take effect July 21 — and consumers will pay the price. According to information [...]

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