The Federal Financial Forum

From: GFSNews.com

The man behind Nomura’s deal to buy Lehman Brothers’ has expressed doubts over aligning financial regulations on a global scale, saying that it will lead to worldwide regulatory failures.

Speaking on Tuesday at the Economist’s Bellwether Europe summit, Sadeq Sayeed – who is now chairman of Metage Capital – said that while global regulation sounded like a good idea, the implications of a failure would be too far-reaching were it all to go wrong.

He said this was especially true while regulators are still failing to understand the huge impact that important decisions – such as refusing to bailout Lehman – can have on the markets.

From: Seeking Alpha 

By Thomas Brown 

Ugh. USA Today’s editorial board is just crazy about Elizabeth Warren’s CFPB:

“For decades before the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, consumers were the orphans in a federal regime set up to regulate financial institutions. Anyone with a credit card might remember the consequences.

Banks were allowed to raise credit card interest rates on existing balances at any time for any reason. Regulators did nothing to stop it until 2008. Charging sky-high fees when a consumer missed a payment deadline even by a few minutes? Also fine with regulators. Explaining the rules in language so incomprehensible that a financial wizard would be hard-pressed to figure them out? Ditto.

From: The Atlantic

This summer’s massive financial regulation bill ended “too big to fail” and bailouts for good, right? While we can certainly hope that such pleasant fantasy is closer to reality than fiction, regulators are becoming increasingly worried that the legislation may have merely transferred some of the catastrophic risk contained in big banks to clearinghouses.

The new regulation bill forced most derivatives to go through clearinghouses, which might render those organizations the new “too big to fail” concerns. The Wall Street Journal devotes a recent op-ed to noting that some regulators have become increasingly concerned about clearinghouses, including Federal Reserve and International Monetary Fund officials. WSJ’s editors warn:

From: Doug Bandow/Forbes Blog

The 2012 presidential election is likely to revolve around the economy.  Barack Obama hopes for an accelerating recovery, but if one comes it won’t be due to his efforts: far higher expenditures, vastly bigger debts, new and increased taxes and more expensive and intrusive regulations.  His principal hope is comparing his performance with his predecessor’s disastrous record of unnecessary war and excessive spending.

Regulation is one of the most important economic battlegrounds.  Unreasonable federal mandates do as much as high taxes to strangle the economy.

Editors Notes:

(1)  Both the proponents and the opponents of the merger should note that neither the FTC  nor the DOJ can utilize any information  from a third party unless the said party meets the requirements of the Data[Information] Quality Act .

(2)  Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski told CNBC Tuesday:  Competition and AT&T’s  market share will be one of the major factors in approving the telecom firm’s proposed $39 billion merger with Deutsche Telekom’s  T-Mobile.

The following article was published on Internet Industry Watch.

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Posted by Kevin Ford on Apr 12th, 2011