The Sunshine Report

Category Archive: BANKS

1. Wall Street Throws A Party But No Customers Show Up

   0 Post on October 26, 2011

   Imag­ine throw­ing a party for your best cus­tomers and none of them show up. What would you think about your future?

   Well, about a week ago at a Miami Beach asset-backed secu­ri­ties con­fer­ence, Wall Street pro­fes­sion­als invited their best insti­tu­tional bond cus­tomers to a cool South Beach party and almost no one showed up.

   Wall Street is loos­ing its rel­e­vance and becom­ing a dinosaur. Its busi­ness sim­ply can­not exist with­out cus­tomers. Unless it fun­da­men­tally reforms, and quickly, an entire gen­er­a­tion of bankers and finance pro­fes­sion­als will find that they are no longer rel­e­vant. [read full story]

   Posted in: BANKS, Credit Crisis, economy, Finance, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Public Policy, REGULATION, Securitization

2. LIBOR Manipulation Redux" rel="bookmark">LIBOR Manipulation Redux

   0 Post on March 25, 2011

   Back in 2008 my very first blog entry was about LIBOR and whether or not it was a real or imag­i­nary inter­est rate. Since that time I wrote another six arti­cles on the topic and got sin­gled out by the British Banker’s Asso­ci­a­tion, the pub­lish­ers of LIBOR, for spe­cial treat­ment and crit­i­cism. Start­ing about two weeks ago it […] [read full story]

   Posted in: BANKS, Finance, LIBOR

3. New Bank Fees Hit Unsuspecting Customers

   0 Post on February 11, 2011

   I have to admire the cre­ativ­ity of money cen­ter bankers. It takes a really imag­i­na­tive mind to think of new ways to do noth­ing of value but still charge out­ra­geous fees as if impor­tant ser­vices are being deliv­ered. [read full story]

   Posted in: BANKS, Finance, REGULATION, Regulatory Reform

4. SBA Policy Restricts Small Business" rel="bookmark">28-Year-Old SBA Policy Restricts Small Business

   2 Post on January 27, 2011

   It’s tough to explain why the Small Busi­ness Admin­is­tra­tion favors banks over non-banks in its flag­ship SBA 7(a) loan pro­gram. For the last 28 years, the SBA has refused to license a sin­gle new non-bank lender and has restricted the abil­ity of exist­ing non-bank 7(a) lenders to finance their port­fo­lios. [read full story]

   Posted in: BANKS, Credit Crisis, economy, Finance, SBA, Small Business Lending

5. Obstacles To Small Business Lending

   0 Post on January 19, 2011

   On Jan­u­ary 13th I attended the FDIC Small Busi­ness Forum titled Over­com­ing Obsta­cles to Small Busi­ness Lend­ing and got an extra­or­di­nary glimpse into why many small busi­nesses are miss­ing the recov­ery.  Even though the forum pan­elists agreed that “what’s good for small busi­ness is good for Amer­ica”, they had few ideas about how to ener­gize […] [read full story]

   Posted in: BANKS, Bernanke, Credit Crisis, economy, Finance, Public Policy, REGULATION, Regulatory Reform, SBA, Small Business Lending

6. What to Learn From Florida’s Mortgage Meltdown

   0 Post on January 10, 2011

   If any­one wants to see a real live mort­gage melt­down in progress, they should visit Florida where, accord­ing to the Amer­i­can Secu­ri­ti­za­tion Forum, more than 50% of secu­ri­tized non-agency Florida res­i­den­tial mort­gages are greater than 60 days past due. [read full story]

   Posted in: BANKS, Credit Crisis, economy, Finance, Mortgage, Public Policy, REGULATION

7. Wall Street’s Fatal Defect — Republished From The Huffington Post

   0 Post on December 29, 2010

   The fate of Fred­die Mac and Fan­nie Mae will be cen­ter stage in Jan­u­ary when the Obama admin­is­tra­tion makes its required Con­gres­sional rec­om­men­da­tions about what to do about the two com­pa­nies. The stakes for home­own­ers and the econ­omy couldn’t be higher as the next Con­gres­sional ses­sion will deter­mine if the U.S. has a pri­vate mort­gage mar­ket or if, by con­trol­ling hous­ing finance, gov­ern­ment bureau­crats will be able to direct where Amer­i­cans live and how much they pay for hous­ing. [read full story]

   Posted in: BANKS, Fannie Mae, Finance, Freddie Mac, housing crisis, Mortgage, Public Policy, REGULATION, Regulatory Reform

8. It’s Not Too Late For Congress To Fix The Derivatives Market

   1 Post on December 13, 2009

   The finan­cial reform leg­is­la­tion that passed the House last week doesn’t fix the deriv­a­tives mar­ket but there is still time to make it right. The Sen­ate hasn’t passed its ver­sion of the bill and all Sen­a­tors need to do is include a pro­vi­sion stop­ping the Fed­eral gov­ern­ment from pre­vent­ing enforce­ment of state and local crim­i­nal […] [read full story]

   Posted in: BANKS, Credit Crisis, Credit Default Swaps, economy, Finance, Politics, Public Policy, REGULATION, Regulatory Reform

9. Why The Government Jobs Policy Isn’t Working

   2 Post on December 3, 2009

   The U.S. econ­omy is going to be sick until job growth returns and unem­ploy­ment is sig­nif­i­cantly reduced. Pres­i­dent Obama’s eco­nomic team doesn’t seem to know how to stim­u­late jobs growth and what they have tried so far isn’t work­ing very well. While Obama’s pol­icy seems to have stopped jobs from dis­ap­pear­ing, that is very dif­fer­ent […] [read full story]

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

10. Bankers Get A Big Surprise: People Without Money Can’t Pay Back Their Debts

    0 Post on October 20, 2009

    Con­sumer lenders that out­source their credit deci­sions to con­sumer credit rat­ing agen­cies aren’t learn­ing from past mis­takes. By now lenders should have noticed that blind reliance on credit scores doesn’t work. Even so, most lenders con­tinue to dis­re­gard good under­writ­ing fun­da­men­tals and then can’t fig­ure out why they con­tinue to have bad credit per­for­mance. It’s […] [read full story]

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