Lynn Parramore

ND20 FinReg Reactions: Elizabeth Warren, Mike Konczal, Marshall Auerback

Last night the Senate signed off on the financial regulation bill by a 59-39 vote. Next step: the bill will move to a conference committee where it will have to be reconciled with the House bill. The Senate bill is big (1,500 pages). It’s unwieldy. It’s full of compromises. Is it enough? What works? What doesn’t? To help you navigate the murky waters of financial reform, we asked ND20 contributors to give us their take. ** Stay tuned for more reactions…

Elizabeth Warren:

“No bill that deals with big issues is ever perfect, but the Senate’s Wall Street reform package will go…

Big Bank Usury: Warren on Whitehouse Amendment

Aristotle called usury the “most hated form” of wealth-accumulation. Dante sent practitioners to the seventh circle of hell. The Qur’an proposes that usurers are controlled by the devil’s influence, and we’ve all heard how Jesus, that avatar of non-violence, was stirred to a round of ass-kicking when he found the money lenders in Herod’s temple.

Screwing the poor through usury has been considered an abomination throughout human civilization - a disease of the body politic that sickens people morally and economically.

For two centuries, American states had the power to enforce usury laws against any lender doing business with its citizens. But in 1978,…

New Sheriffs in Town

TIME hails three women gunning for better ways to do business.

At New Deal 2.0, we’re fortunate in having the voice of the man known as the Sheriff of Wall Street, Eliot Spitzer. But we’ve also got one of the three women Time Magazine has named to carry the mantle in the post-crisis era, Elizabeth Warren.

Michael Scherer confirms what ND20 contributors like Nomi Prins (Women Reformers Motivated by a No Tolerance Rule) and Joe Costello (Top Five Heroes of Financial Reform) have been saying for some time: Women are at the forefront of changing the way we do business in America. They’ve been…

May 3

“What you need to know to navigate today’s economic debate.”

Goldman Sachs has mounting legal woes (CNN Money)
Federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into Goldman and its employees, over whether it may have committed securities fraud in its mortgage trading operations.

The dance of the deficit hawks (PressDemocrat)
Robert Kuttner on the dangerous ‘fiscal alarmism’ that is sweeping the nation.

Our Giant Banking Crisis — What to Expect (NYRoB)
Paul Krugman and Robin Wells on the recently-released This Time Is Different and two reports by the IMF.

Senate Readies for Financial Bill Votes (The Caucus)
Lawmakers set to begin voting on changes to the measure being proposed by both…

The Deficit: Nine Myths We Can’t Afford

Has the federal government run out of money? Will we have to slash Social Security? Will we have to borrow dollars from China for our children to pay back?

The national debate over fiscal responsibility and sustainability is entering a new, critical phase. Today, an 18-member bipartisan commission to examine the government’s fiscal problem will meet for the first time. Everything is on the table, including Social Security and Medicare.

With so much at stake, the time has come to examine our fundamental assumptions about government deficits and debt. The danger of accepting oft-repeated orthodoxies has been clearly demonstrated in the recent…

Bill Black Blasts Lehman Fraud at Congressional Hearing

Following up on his recent co-authored ND20 post with Eliot Spitzer (”Time for Truth: Three-Card Monte is for Suckers“), Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Bill Black delivered blistering testimony before the House Financial Services Committee yesterday on Lehman’s history of deceiving creditors and investors. Saying that it was high time to be “blunt” about the practices of Lehman and other financial firms, Black pulled no punches: “Lehman’s story is a story, in large part, of fraud.” He denounced Lehman as the key orchestrator of subprime and “liar’s loan’s operations” for most of the decade leading up to the global crisis. Watch him testify here:

Real News Network Talks to Thomas Ferguson about Massachussetts election

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Thomas Ferguson talks to RNN’s Paul Jay about the Massachusetts upset and what it might mean in November. Recently, Ferguson co-authored an intriguing paper with Jie Chen that takes an in-depth look at returns town by town, overturning conventional wisdom on why the state swung for Brown. Their analysis reveals the effect of falling housing prices and unemployment on the outcome.

Watch video:

In Memory of Paul Samuelson, Nobel Prize-winning Economist

As the debate on financial reform reaches a frenzy, we’d like to pause a moment to remember the great Paul Samuelson, one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. A memorial service for Samuelson, who died in December, 2009, was held on April 10, where colleagues, students, and friends spoke of his enormous impact on MIT, where he attracted economists Robert Solow, Paul Krugman, Franco Modigliani, Robert Merton, and Roosevelt Institute Chief Economist and Senior Fellow Joe Stiglitz, and his transformative influence on the field of economics. Samuelson, one of the founders of neo-Keynesian economics, used the tools of mathematics to clarify and add new rigor to the field, and in doing so, reshaped the nation itself.

Watch the full memorial service…

Good news today? SEC open meeting on asset-backed securities

Today might bring some much-needed good news to investors. The SEC will vote on a set of proposed rules revising the disclosure, reporting and offering process for asset-backed securities — those tricky and potentially troublesome items created by buying and bundling loans like residential mortgage loans, commercial loans or student loans — and creating securities backed by those assets, which are then sold to investors.

The proposals are designed to better protect investors who have too often found themselves screwed in the securitization market. Often, a bundle of loans is divided into separate securities with different levels of risk and returns.…

Krugman says Roosevelt’s Mike Konczal is ‘Essential Reading’ on Financial Reform

In yesterday’s New York Times, Paul Krugman criticizes the Dodd bill, calling it a long way from ‘fool-resistant.’ The bill, he notes, leaves far too much to the discretion of the Financial Stability Oversight Council — an interagency task force that includes some folks that haven’t exactly won our confidence, like the chairman of the Fed and the Treasury Secretary. Krugman cites Roosevelt Institute fellow and ND20 blogger Mike Konczal as the man who understands the problems with the plan:

Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute, whose blog has become essential reading for anyone interested in financial reform, has pointed out…