The 119-page government complaint alleges that S&P repeatedly “adjusted and delayed” improvements to its analytical models and “knowingly disregarded the true extent of the credit risks” associated with the CDO investments it rated.
Category: Regulation
The Messy (and Risky) Ways That Governments Try to Manage Risks
We are at serious risk because of the subjective nature of the way all these factors shape the risk management policy making we depend on to protect us. But in a democracy there is no way around this mess, because of the very subjective nature of ‘risk’ itself.
Too Fast To Fail: Is High-Speed Trading the Next Wall Street Disaster?
But why stop there? One trading engineer has proposed positioning a line of drones over the ocean, where they would flash microwave data from one to the next like the chain of mountaintop signal fires in The Lord of the Rings. “At what point do you say, ‘This is fast enough’?” asks Brent Weisenborn, a former NASDAQ vice president.
The People Versus The Bankers
To understand why bankers love the status quo you have to understand how they pay themselves. Unlike most enterprises, labour actually has more power than capital at the big banks because debt plays such a huge role on bank balance sheets. To make shareholders feel better about this quasi-Marxist relationship, bankers use “return on equity” as a way to justify their compensation.
How Toxic Finance First Met Toxic Chemical
But is the tie between industrial poisons and speculative excess a mere accident of timing? History suggests otherwise. Deregulation, financial bubbles, and chemical contamination have a common heritage that goes back all the way to Victorian England. They became linked in 1880, when the great British statesman William Ewart Gladstone restructured the taxation of beer.
Abnormal Capitalist 