One simple graph by the Thomas M. Hoenig, Vice Chairman of the U.S.’s Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) on how big banks (defined as those with assets over $10 billion) in the U.S. have become bigger and bigger in the past three decades. Simon Johnson summarizes his observations nicely: The facts may startle you. In 1984, […]
More than five years after Lehman Brothers collapsed, I decided to take a deep dive on the mechanics behind the derivatives world. One of the most interesting documents was the report by Lehman’s court-appointed bankruptcy examiner Anton R. Valukas, which runs 2,200 pages (disclaimer: I did not finish reading all!). The report shed light on accounting […]
The one thing I am impressed the most with my stay here in the US is the creativity and entrepreneurship of the young people. When there is a problem, there is always a solution–and people can make money from it. I once moaned about the difficulty of getting a taxi in Boston, and have recently found […]
Lobbying by financial firms is nothing new. In the past decade the finance and real estate industries more than doubled spending on lobbyists, reaching $474m in 2010, according to FT, citing figures from the Center for Responsive Politics. An IMF working paper published in 2009 found that banks which spent more on lobbying performed the […]