“We Are in a Cabal... Five or Six Players ... Own the Regulatory Apparatus. Everybody Is Afraid to Regulate Them" → Washingtons Blog
“We Are in a Cabal... Five or Six Players ... Own the Regulatory Apparatus. Everybody Is Afraid to Regulate Them" - Washingtons Blog

Thursday, April 1, 2010

“We Are in a Cabal... Five or Six Players ... Own the Regulatory Apparatus. Everybody Is Afraid to Regulate Them"


Harold Bradley - who oversees almost $2 billion in assets as chief investment officer at the Kauffman Foundation - told the Reuters Global Exchanges and Trading Summit in New York that a cabal is preventing swap derivatives from being forced onto clearing exchanges:

There is no incentive from the moneyed interests in either Washington or New York to change it...

I believe we are in a cabal. There are five or six players only who are engaged and dominant in this marketplace and apparently they own the regulatory apparatus. Everybody is afraid to regulate them.

Indeed, as I wrote last May:

In at least one area - one of the most important causes of the financial crisis - reform has already been defeated.

By way of background, the derivatives industry has volunteered (once again) to regulate itself.

As Newsweek noted April 10th, the big boys were using bailout money to aggressively lobby against the regulation of credit default swaps:

Major Wall Street players are digging in against fundamental changes. And while it clearly wants to install serious supervision, the Obama administration—along with other key authorities like the New York Fed—appears willing to stand back while Wall Street resurrects much of the ultracomplex global trading system that helped lead to the worst financial collapse since the Depression.

At issue is whether trading in credit default swaps and other derivatives—and the giant, too-big-to-fail firms that traded them—will be allowed to dominate the financial landscape again once the crisis passes. As things look now, that is likely to happen. And the firms may soon be recapitalized and have a lot more sway in Washington—all of it courtesy of their supporters in the Obama administration...

The financial industry isn't leaving anything to chance, however. One sign of a newly assertive Wall Street emerged recently when a bevy of bailed-out firms, including Citigroup, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, formed a new lobby calling itself the Coalition for Business Finance Reform. Its goal: to stand against heavy regulation of "over-the-counter" derivatives, in other words customized contracts that are traded off an exchange...

Geithner's new rules would allow the over-the-counter market to boom again, orchestrated by global giants that will continue to be "too big to fail" (they may have to be rescued again someday, in other words). And most of it will still occur largely out of sight of regulated exchanges...

The old culture is reasserting itself with a vengeance. All of which runs up against the advice now being dispensed by many of the experts who were most prescient about the crash and its causes—the outsiders, in other words, as opposed to the insiders who are still running the show.

And today, Treasury gave the financial giants exactly what they wanted. As Bloomberg writes in an article entitled "Wall Street Derivatives Proposals Adopted in Treasury Overhaul ":

Wall Street’s largest banks are getting what they want in the U.S. Treasury’s plan to regulate over-the-counter derivatives by making all market participants adhere to the same capital requirements...

The banks appear to wish to maintain the intra-dealer market and raise barriers to new entrants to keep the OTC business as compartmentalized as possible and to protect their profitable market conditions,” said Brad Hintz, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York. “The Street’s lobbyists appear to be asking for a ‘club’ structure in OTC trading.”...

The bank-written plan, titled “Outline of Potential OTC Derivatives Legislative Proposal” and dated Feb. 13, said the systemic regulator “shall promulgate rules” requiring “capital adequacy,” “regulatory and market transparency” and “counterparty collateral requirements.”

Hintz said Wall Street revenue from trading fixed-income, commodities and currency swaps in the over-the-counter market may be reduced by 15 percent under the Treasury’s changes. “Limiting potential competition” in the market “may not be an unreasonable position to take” by the banks due to the potential loss of income, he said...

Investment banks fought regulation of OTC derivatives for more than a decade because the contracts provide a significant portion of bank earnings.

Do you get it?

Instead of "blowing up or burning" over-the-counter CDS - as nobel economist Myron Scholes urged - or making any other real changes which would help the economy and the consumer, the rule changes are mainly a p.r. effort by the derivatives industry itself (like the stress tests were a p.r stunt by the banking industry.) The "changes" will do virtually everything the derivatives industry asked for, including guaranteeing the big banks' profits in selling CDS by keeping out smaller competitors.

Regulation of over the counter CDS has already failed.
And see this.

Given that JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley together held 80% of the country's derivatives risk and 96% of the exposure to credit derivatives as of July 2009, those are probably the players to which Bradley is referring.

5 comments:

  1. Admit nothing, deny everything....


    Goldman Sachs Has A Message For The World


    Goldman Sachs: Don't Blame Us
    When it comes to its role in the financial crisis, Goldman Sachs has a message for the world: Not guilty. Not one bit

    The firm's 32,000 employees are seen as an army of Gordon Gekkos, greedy manipulators who pumped up the housing bubble, then bet opportunistically on its implosion as American International Group (AIG), its trading partner, buckled under massive debts. It is widely alleged—though unproven—that Goldman called on its close friends in government to arrange for an AIG bailout, effectively pocketing billions of taxpayer dollars. "Every game has a sucker," says William K. Black, a professor of law and economics at the University of Missouri at Kansas City who was deputy director of the Federal Savings & Loan Insurance Corp., "and in this case, the sucker was not so much AIG as it was the U.S. government and taxpayer."

    Heads Goldman wins, tails you lose, America.


    http://tinyurl.com/ya69v68

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wake up people... You are ALL being played. Woo Woo Woo! Look over here, this data is inconsistent with the "real" numbers. Look over there, that statement is contradictory, it doesn't make any sense. It is all done on purpose to keep the people polarized and confused. Wake up America! You are ALL being screwed while you are led to think that some of you are more clever than the others The bottom line is that we are all enslaved and paying the freight for the elite to gamble with whatever wealth the nation has left... If we allow it to continue they will succeed in bankrupting the economy within a few years. So keep arguiing and trying to prove who is smarter than whoever... That is exactly what they want and that is why the corporate MSM exists. Time for the sleepers to awake!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Its easy remove all government backstops and guarantees. Of course they want limited regulation and for the band to play on, if things go south they get balied out, if things go well they keep the profits.

    And the media sits silent and is complicit in the robbery.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Awake and do what? Stop paying your taxes to the Rothschilds. YOUR consent and compliance keep these murderers in power. Nothing else.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Words will not solve this problem.

    ReplyDelete

→ Thank you for contributing to the conversation by commenting. We try to read all of the comments (but don't always have the time).

→ If you write a long comment, please use paragraph breaks. Otherwise, no one will read it. Many people still won't read it, so shorter is usually better (but it's your choice).

→ The following types of comments will be deleted if we happen to see them:

-- Comments that criticize any class of people as a whole, especially when based on an attribute they don't have control over

-- Comments that explicitly call for violence

→ Because we do not read all of the comments, I am not responsible for any unlawful or distasteful comments.