On March 9, 2007, Rhode Island Representative Patrick Kennedy introduced HR 1424. At the time it was to be known as the Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act of 2007. The bill contained five small sections intending to ensure equal coverage and treatment for mental health issues under insurance claims. It passed the House but then gained an [...]
The current state of geological science cannot predict an earthquake. There is hope, however, that warnings might be realistically developed so that populations in danger of the “big one” can be given some sort of reasonable information about probabilities. In studying the past few devastating quakes, such as the 2011 9.0 that hit Japan twice (once in the shaking, then [...]
A decade ago, the financial world was alive. I don’t mean alive in the same way much of humanity was at the fall of the Berlin Wall or on VE Day in 1945. Rather, people at that particular moment had their eyes pulled opened just a bit for the first time in a very long time, maybe in the same [...]
In Ian Fleming’s 1959 spy novel Goldfinger, he makes mention of the Moscow Rules. These were rules-of-thumb for clandestine agents working during the Cold War in the Soviet capital, a notoriously difficult assignment. Among the quips included in the catalog were, “everyone is potentially under opposition control” and “do not harass the opposition.” Fleming’s book added another, “Once is an [...]
In July 2012, the LIBOR manipulation scandal broke wide and before Congress then-Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke used it to cleverly cover up for his crisis actions (more so inactions). He told the Senate Banking Committee that the LIBOR system was “structurally flawed” before intimating it had been that way for some time. Asked if the rates calculated by the [...]
Ben Bernanke, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve, told Congress in March 2007 that subprime was contained. He will rightfully be remembered in infamy for that, but that wasn’t the most egregious example of being wrong. Even putting it in those terms risks understating the problem and why it stubbornly lingers. Being really wrong is claiming that IOER will establish [...]
How do we measure what has been lost over the last ten years? There is no single way to calculate it, let alone a correct solution. There are so many sides to an economy that choosing one risks overstating that facet at the expense of another. It’s somewhat of an impossible task already given the staggering dimensions. If someone had [...]
When Bear Stearns nearly failed, made to merge, in March 2008 it wasn’t really a surprise. Yes, markets were shocked by the demise of the ancient firm, one of the bulge bracket cartel which suggested surprise over the severity of it more than that things were going bad. For more than a year, starting in early 2007, Bear had been [...]
With 2a7 money market reform only a few weeks from its full implementation, there should be by now visible shifts in all the places where such reform will directly impact. Prominent among these money spaces is commercial paper, where the ranks of prime MMF’s that once lent in this market have been reduced in the shift toward government funds. As [...]
The fact that we are still discussing illiquidity in “dollar” markets everywhere shows just how little has changed despite so much time and effort. It is August 9 again, the ninth anniversary of the day that changed everything. Even though it has been almost a decade, it’s as if “we” learned nothing from the experience. There are indications in 2016 [...]
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