The Sunshine Report

Archive: May 2009

1. Securitization Accounting Rules Are Changing

   Comments Off Post on May 27, 2009

   Accoun­tants are chang­ing the rules gov­ern­ing most of the shadow bank­ing sys­tem and almost no one is notic­ing. About 10 days ago the Finan­cial Account­ing Stan­dards Board con­firmed that by year end “secu­ri­ti­za­tion account­ing” will be dif­fer­ent and the changes are likely to have a big­ger effect on finan­cial insti­tu­tions than mark to mar­ket account­ing. […] [read full story]

   Posted in: Accounting, economy, FAS 140, FIN 46, Finance, Public Policy, Securitization

2. SEC Declares War On Capital Market’s Criminals" rel="bookmark">The SEC Declares War On Capital Market’s Criminals

   0 Post on May 25, 2009

   It didn’t take long for the “new SEC” to begin enforc­ing the law and declar­ing war on white col­lar crim­i­nals that have preyed on the cap­i­tal mar­kets. A cou­ple of weeks ago the SEC filed an insider trad­ing civil suit against two for­mer traders in con­nec­tion with trad­ing in credit default swaps using insider infor­ma­tion […] [read full story]

   Posted in: Cox, Credit Default Swaps, economy, Finance, Mary Schapiro, Public Policy, REGULATION, Regulatory Reform, SEC

3. Cash Is King When Treasuries Are Bubbly, a Forbes Article

   0 Post on May 22, 2009

   Today Forbes pub­lished an arti­cle that I authored about the Trea­sury note and bond mar­ket. Basi­cally, I think that the mar­ket is over­val­ued and con­tin­ues to show signs of a bub­ble. Click here to jump to Forbes and read the arti­cle. [read full story]

   Posted in: economy, Federal Reserve, Finance, Forbes, Politics, Public Policy

4. Banks Will Give Credit To Anyone; Even Me!!!

   2 Post on

   It hap­pened again. Some­one stole my iden­tity. Three nights ago I found out that some scum­bag was parad­ing around as “me” when Cap­i­talOne called to ask if I was really apply­ing for a Plat­inum Card with a $50,000 credit limit. As it turns out, I wasn’t. The next day I went online and ordered my […] [read full story]

   Posted in: BANKS, Credit Crisis, economy, Finance, Politics, Public Policy

5. Banking’s Dirty Little Compensation Secret

   5 Post on May 20, 2009

   Banking’s dirty lit­tle com­pen­sa­tion secret is that most of the fury over bank exec­u­tive pay lim­its is fake. Since the for­ma­tion of the FDIC dur­ing the Great Depres­sion Fed­eral reg­u­la­tors have had the legal author­ity to limit bank pay and have reg­u­larly used that author­ity. But vocal Admin­is­tra­tion crit­ics seem to be inten­tion­ally mis­lead­ing the […] [read full story]

   Posted in: Bank Compensation, BANKS, economy, Finance, Obama, Politics, Public Policy, REGULATION

6. Obama’s Stress Tests Are Designed To Help Banks Raise Capital

   2 Post on May 10, 2009

   Most crit­ics of the Stress Test have missed the point of the tests and under­es­ti­mate the Obama Administration’s clev­er­ness in help­ing banks raise cap­i­tal. The Stress Tests weren’t about reg­u­la­tory super­vi­sion and cer­tainly weren’t an excuse for the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion to nation­al­ize the banks. The tests were designed to pro­vide stan­dard­ized bench­marks, assump­tions and pro­jec­tions […] [read full story]

   Posted in: BANKS, Confidence, Credit Crisis, economy, Finance, Obama, Politics, Public Policy, REGULATION

7. TALF Isn’t Working And Needs To Be Fixed" rel="bookmark">TALF Isn’t Working And Needs To Be Fixed

   2 Post on May 6, 2009

   TALF isn’t work­ing and needs to be fixed. It was sup­posed to repair the secu­ri­ti­za­tion and struc­tured finance bond mar­ket with $1 tril­lion of U.S. gov­ern­ment fund­ing, but instead TALF has been a non-event and an irrel­e­vant pro­gram. Appli­cants to the TALF pro­gram are hard to find and the secu­ri­ti­za­tion and struc­tured finance mar­ket remains […] [read full story]

   Posted in: BANKS, Credit Crisis, economy, Finance, Politics, Public Policy, Securitization, TALF