Barney Frank

... to Johns who have insatiable lusts.

As if anyone thought otherwise, the final shape of finreg has now been formalized and as Shahien Nasiripour at the Huffington Post notes, "many of the measures that offered the greatest chances to fundamentally reshape how the Street conducts business have been struck out, weakened, or rendered irrelevant." Congrats, middle class, once again you get raped by Wall Street, which is off to the races to yet again rapidly blow itself up courtesy of 30x leverage, unlimited discount window usage, trillions in excess reserves, quadrillions in unregulated derivatives, a TBTF framework that has been untouched and will need a rescue in under a year, non-existent accounting rules, a culture of unmitigated greed, and all of Congress and Senate on its payroll. And, sorry, you can't even vote some of the idiots that passed this garbage out: after all there is a retiring lame duck in charge of it all. We can only hope his annual Wall Street (i.e. taxpayer funded) annuity will satisfy his conscience for destroying any hope America could have of a credible financial system.

Just out from Reuters: Barney Frank has introduced the Frank Bank Levy Proposal, which would tax banks with more than $50 billion in assets, and hedge funds with more than $10 billion, and use the money to fund $4 billion for neighborhood assistance and foreclosure help for the jobless with good credit. In other words, big banks and hedge funds will be funding Obama's next stimulus for his core constituency.

Members of the
House-Senate Conference Committee on financial regulation are meeting
for a third day of deliberations on the Restoring American Financial
Stability Act of 2010. As part of the offered modification language which we discussed yesterday, the Committee today will focus to do all it can to eliminate any and every Fed-unwelcome initiative as part of the audit the Fed provision in the Congressional version of the Fin Reg bill. All those who want to see how corrupt politicians destroy any chance of fair and effective financial regulation are encouraged to tune in and focus their attention on Barney Frank.

C-Span Link Here

Barney Frank has released the House "offer" language on various issues to be discussed tomorrow during the House-Senate Conference Committee, which will convene at 11am in Rayburn Room 2128. While some of the items on the docket relating to Investor Protection and Executive Compensation, are largely irrelevant, Barney will also discuss such critical issues as the Fed Audit, the Fed's emergency lending power, and Foreign FX swaps. Ignoring that 80% of the S population demand an end to fed secrecy, the just released proposed language also appears to peddle exclusively to Bernanke and his Wall Street superiors, in that items under debate for the audit will not include monetary policy, and it will be America's sad fate to extinguish under a 0% interest rate, never knowing how such lunacy can have come to be, until such time as the banking system blows itself up once again. This way the American public will never know whether someone like Goldman Sachs (in addition to Jerome Kerviel) has had any influence in determining monetary policy.

What are they doing down in D.C.? Nothing helpful.

Just because nobody can possibly get enough of listening to Barney Frank steamroll his opposition with irrefutable logic, here is a link to a C-SPAN video of the debate over how to make Chris Dodd's already toothless bill lose its dentures, just so the President can declare victory over TBTF only to have to bailout Citi all over again in less than a year.

C-SPAN link.

Our earnings are robust, our compensation has returned to its naturally high levels and, as a result, we have very nearly regained our grip on the imaginations of the most ambitious students at the finest universities — and from that single fact many desirable outcomes follow. Thus, we have almost fully recovered from what we have agreed to call The Great Misfortune. In the next few weeks, however, ill-informed senators will meet with ill-paid representatives to reconcile their ill-conceived financial reform bills. This process cannot and should not be stopped. The American people require at least the illusion of change. But it can be rendered harmless to our interests. - From Wall Street's Man In Washington

In early April, we noted that the IMF was preparing for something big when we observed that the IMF was launching a new credit facility, the New Arrangements to Borrow, with $550 billion in total commitments (of which the US was at the top in terms of funding responsibility). Incidentally this was before the Greek parliament storming led 2 year spreads to jump to 20%+, and the announcement of the biggest bailout in history by the EU, and came at a time when the IMF's rescue contribution was expected to be a paltry $10 billion, only to end up well north of $200 billion. Indeed, the IMF knew all too well what was coming. And judging by what the IMF is doing behind the scenes with its new alphabet soup of rescue facilities, things are about to get much worse once in the sovereign arena yet again.

Matt Taibbi coined the phrase of 2009 with Great Vampire Squid Wrapped Around The Face Of Humanity

Here is his submission for 2010: Ben Bernanke = The Fed's Goblin-in-chief

The other perspective: "The US Senate has passed its version of financial regulatory reform that will include serious changes, some expected, some not, specific to the OTC derivatives market. The passage of this bill will lead to a compromise bill created jointly by the House and Senate and ultimately President Obama signing it into law before 4th of July barbeques are under way. Although its contents are questionable, getting the bill out of the Senate is a good thing as the Hill will finally be removed from the Street. But as we’ve learned during the entire, multi-year reform process, the devil is really in the details and unfortunately many of the details continue to be a bit hazy. At last check, there were 434 proposed amendments to the Senate bill. Most of these amendments will fall by the wayside now as the Senate was anxious to move the process along, but sorting out and knowing what’s in, what’s out and what replaces what may well require a gaggle of Congressional staffers. Even with the final text made clear, most of us at TABB Group are left trying to decipher the “spirit” of the law."

On the 5th of March in 1946, in Fulton Missouri, at Westminster College, Winston Churchill delivered an address (since christened the "Sinews of Peace") lamenting the burgeoning power and influence being slowly but surely gathered up by the Soviet Union.  Perhaps the address will be familiar to some of you owing to its most famous passage....

Here are two accounts dissecting in detail the events from yesterday. One is from Dan Hinckley at Wild Analytics, the second from Dan O'Brien.

The Mass legislator totally loses it after penning yet another angry letter (he is good at that; being unconflicted and actually passing sensible and Wall Street influence-free laws, not so much) in which he says that the $6 trillion extra toxic debt on the US Treasury's books from the GSEs (which the democrats refuse to recognize) is really the republicans' fault. The fact that Barney was instrumental to creating the parabolic phase of the housing bubble with his idiotic statements in 2005 that there is "no bubble", and that his commission currently refuses to deal with issues such as the GSEs and a repeat of the housing bubble is completely absent from his letter.

I'm about half convinced on this lady. I'd like to get convinced on the other half.