Word: banks
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...Reining in the Banks At the World Economic Forum in Davos last January, some participants advocated radical measures to rein in banks, including regulating their operations so heavily that they would turn into low-risk utilities. No, said Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, that wouldn't solve the problem. What's needed, he argued, "are air bags, cushions and shock absorbers." Trichet has now detailed what he means. On Sept. 6, a group of central-bank governors and regulators from 27 countries that is chaired by Trichet published specific proposals that he said would...
...take a prize at Venice to grab the attention of the world press. Michael Moore, whose Fahrenheit 9/11 is the top-grossing documentary of all time, shifted his focus to the financial meltdown in Capitalism: A Love Story. Provocative and wildly ambitious, it expands beyond the housing and banking crises of the past year into an epic of malfeasance: capital crimes on a national scale. With enough corporate villains to stock a hundred melodramas, who is the hero? The writer-director-star himself. There he is, attempting to make a citizen's arrest of AIG executives and parking an armored...
...National Parks seems unlikely to cause an outcry. Parks are not as costly as a bank bailout or as angst-inducing as health care, and who wants to be the one to throw a spitball at Old Faithful? The documentary cannily stops at 1980, avoiding the Ronald Reagan - James Watt era as well as today's drill-here, drill-now controversies. It helps too that one of the parks' most vigorous progressive advocates was a Republican - President Teddy Roosevelt. See pictures of the Roosevelt Cartoons...
...rare move, a federal judge threw out a proposed $33 million settlement between the Securities and Exchange Commission and Bank of America stemming from the company's January takeover of Merrill Lynch. The SEC had sued the bank over $3.6 billion in undisclosed bonuses paid to Merrill staff before the deal. Judge Jed Rakoff accused bankers and regulators of having a "cynical relationship" that penalizes shareholders rather than bank executives...
...Consider the financial reforms that Obama's Administration wants to push through Congress: the big ones are creating a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, giving the Federal Reserve the job of systemic-risk regulator and establishing a "resolution regime" to wind down troubled nonbank financial institutions (like Lehman) and complex bank holding companies. Steps in the right direction? Probably. Truly major reforms? Not so much--and even they may not win congressional approval...