Financial News

[southsider2k5]

I'm sure Bloomberg gave the orders to fill those buses, no matter what.

 

Hopefully if it happens in Chicago, Emanuel makes them pay a full fare first.

[StrangeSox]

Those protesters are just bound to do something illegal and violent any day now, better round them up and arrest them before they get the chance! #policestatesrule

[southsider2k5]

Those protesters are just bound to do something illegal and violent any day now, better round them up and arrest them before they get the chance! #policestatesrule

 

Better yet, just disband the entire police department because one guy used mace.

[StrangeSox]

Curious timing, they didn't need buses for the first two weeks but just happen to have them when they lead a bunch of people on to the bridge and arrest them...

[southsider2k5]

Exactly #anarchynow

[Balta1701]

Exactly #anarchynow

Don't you have champagne to drink?

[southsider2k5]

Nah, I have trash barrels to throw through windows #myfairshare

[mr_genius]

Curious timing, they didn't need buses for the first two weeks but just happen to have them when they lead a bunch of people on to the bridge and arrest them...

 

yes, a very strange coincidence.

[Balta1701]

yes, a very strange coincidence.

There is a reasonable explanation...if for example someone was tweeting earlier in the day that they were going to march to location x, then that would be a reasonable response, since the police would know it was coming.

 

I'm not sure if that was the case or not.

[StrangeSox]

Exactly #anarchynow

You don't have to be left out, there's anarcho-capitalism, too!

[StrangeSox]

There is a reasonable explanation...if for example someone was tweeting earlier in the day that they were going to march to location x, then that would be a reasonable response, since the police would know it was coming.

 

I'm not sure if that was the case or not.

 

They knew they were going to march across the bridge, and apparently the police told the protesters to remain on the pedestrian walkway. At some point, and this is where the dispute is, a small number of protesters in the front began to march on to the roadway. The police didn't stop them, and if warnings were given they were drowned out for anyone not in the immediate front. The protesters in the back see people being led on to the road by the police and follow without resistance. Halfway across, the police stop them at the front and cut them off from the back.

 

The transportation workers union is suing the city for forcing their workers to drive the buses with prisoners.

[kapkomet]

Tea party protests = racist mother f***ers who are trying to disrupt anything and everything our country stands for

 

Wall street protests = peaceful, wonderful, righteous people who were set up just to get thrown in jail...

 

WTF. Get over your biases.

[Rex Kickass]

A friend of mine was arrested this weekend on the Brooklyn Bridge protest. Protesters were given the choice of walking on the pedestrian causeway, or walking on the roadway. Protesters were also told that they were closing the Brooklyn Bridge to traffic FOR the protest, but they were also told that they risked arrest by walking on the roadway. It was termed "a different action."

 

Most of those protesters knew that they risked arrest.

 

I don't know how I feel about the Occupy Wall Street protests. I see the validity, but I am concerned by the lack of a message or goal. I guess you could call me mildly sympathetic, but wary.

[Y2HH]

A friend of mine was arrested this weekend on the Brooklyn Bridge protest. Protesters were given the choice of walking on the pedestrian causeway, or walking on the roadway. Protesters were also told that they were closing the Brooklyn Bridge to traffic FOR the protest, but they were also told that they risked arrest by walking on the roadway. It was termed "a different action."

 

Most of those protesters knew that they risked arrest.

 

I don't know how I feel about the Occupy Wall Street protests. I see the validity, but I am concerned by the lack of a message or goal. I guess you could call me mildly sympathetic, but wary.

 

This.

 

This is my problem with these so called protests -- what are they protesting, exactly -- regular people working regular jobs? This is often the problem with such mass protests, in that they fail to actually acquire their intended targets, and instead interrupt the lives of regular people, which merely infuriates the people they're not meaning to infuriate.

 

I know quite a few people who work at the Chicago Board of Trade, and absolutely ZERO of them are rich. Instead, like many others, they struggle to make ends meet. They're the people who's lives get interrupted during these protests...as the billionaires simply don't go to work in their diamond encrusted helicopters until the protests end...because they have like 5000 vacation days they can use, not to mention they can work remotely and continue making millions uninterrupted by people yelling in the streets making getting too/from work a hassle for regular people like myself.

 

Such protests annoy me, and make me detest protesters since I've had to walk through such a crowd a few times at Blue Cross (where I work). Because, you know, it's awesome getting yelled at by anti-health insurance people simply because I have a job here...only I'm not some rich health care jerk that pockets your premiums, just a regular person.

Edited October 4, 2011 by Y2HH

[southsider2k5]

Well I will say to this point there aren't enough of them to really disrupt anything in Chicago. The communists and socialists are way more impressive when it comes to screwing things up, as are the anti-war people. This group is extraordinarily tiny... like 25 to 30 people tops each of the times I have walked by there. It looks even worse when they spread out around the three corners.

[StrangeSox]

Well I will say to this point there aren't enough of them to really disrupt anything in Chicago. The communists and socialists are way more impressive when it comes to screwing things up, as are the anti-war people. This group is extraordinarily tiny... like 25 to 30 people tops each of the times I have walked by there. It looks even worse when they spread out around the three corners.

 

From DePaul's newspaper:

"DePaul students have increasingly joined the around-the-clock protest, which began on Sept. 24. In less than one week, the number of DePaul students involved jumped from less than three to more than 15.

 

15! Wow! Look out, fat cats!

Edited October 4, 2011 by StrangeSox

[southsider2k5]

From DePaul's newspaper:

 

 

15! Wow! Look out, fat cats!

 

I saw one of their marches on Friday. 15 was about right. The problem was they marched back to the school and didn't really stay with the protests.

[Balta1701]

15! Wow! Look out, fat cats!

For the Tea party, they'd get about 2 hours on Fox with that kind of crowd.

[southsider2k5]

Oops.

 

http://www.tradersmagazine.com/news/shorti...=tm_xtra_100411

 

As debates over short selling rage both in the United States and Europe, two new reports question the effectiveness of the short-selling bans enacted by a quartet of nations this summer.

 

Reports released on Monday by both Credit Suisse and Instinet found that the Aug. 12 short-selling bans on certain financial companies instituted by Belgium, France, Italy and Spain did little to slow the slide in share prices for affected stocks.

 

The Credit Suisse study found that since the effective date of the bans, which are still in effect and have now been extended, financial stocks for which shorting is banned are down 10.4 percent, while financials without a ban are down only 4.4 percent.

 

Alison Crosthwait, Instinet

 

This implies that long sellers, not short sellers, are forcing prices down, according to the study. What is more, the bans on short selling seem to have reduced liquidity in the banned names.

 

Perhaps most disturbing, however, the study found that the bans might have contributed to the widening of bid-ask spreads. After the ban, the average spreads in affected financials diverged from non-affected financials that the study examined—the stocks with bans on shorting displayed relatively wider spreads.

 

“They tracked each other quite well in the build-up to the ban, and it’s only when the ban was introduced that you see the divergence,” said Mark Buchanan, a director of portfolio strategy at Credit Suisse and one of the co-authors of the report.

 

Buchanan noted the increase in the bid-ask spread would typically lead to higher costs of trading. Jonathan Tse, another co-author of the report, added that these costs could get passed along to investors trying to rebalance their portfolios or engage in other activities completely independent from the speculation targeted by the bans.

 

The Instinet study did not reach the same findings regarding bid-ask spreads. But it did find that financial stocks in countries with the ban have performed similarly to financials in countries without the ban.

 

The study did find that in Italy and Spain financial stocks fared somewhat better than the national blue chip indexes. In Belgium and France, however, financials performed more poorly than the overall market, in spite of the bans on short selling.

 

“During volatile periods, even in the presence of a short-sale ban, markets move where they’re going to move based on fundamental and macroeconomic factors,” said Alison Crosthwait, author of the report and managing director for global market structure research at Instinet. “A short-sale ban does not provide a cushion or floor to prices.”

 

Volatility, as measured by the degree of average daily price moves, fell during the period of the short-sale bans. But the study found the reduction in volatility in Belgium, France, Italy and Spain was similar to the reduction in other European countries as well as in the U.S. and Canada.

 

The study concluded that the short-sale bans did not succeed in protecting markets from extreme volatility—and if anything harmed market quality.

 

The two reports’ findings echoed those of previous studies that examined short-selling restrictions in Germany in 2010 and around the world in 2008. Some of those studies were able to use more data and longer time horizons, Crosthwait said.

 

Still, when markets are volatile, regulators are often tempted to take decisive actions, even if the evidence might question the effectiveness of those moves, she added.

 

“They are thinking very carefully, judiciously, about their decisions, but I don’t think that the academic studies are the major factor impacting their decisions,” Crosthwait said.

[Balta1701]

This program was entirely set up and run by this administration, out of TARP funds, with no Congressional input to how it was run. Therefore...this is entirely on them...and it's probably my single biggest issue with them. Their failure here has helped make sure there won't be any housing recovery for a whiel.

Why has the administration’s flagship foreclosure prevention program been so ineffective in helping struggling homeowners get loan modifications and stay in their homes? One reason: The government’s supervision of the program has apparently ranged from nonexistent to weak.

 

Documents obtained by ProPublica — government audit reports of GMAC, the country’s fifth-largest mortgage servicer — provide the first detailed look at the program’s oversight. They show that the company operated with almost no oversight for the program’s first eight months. When auditors did finally conduct a major review more than a year into the program, they found that GMAC had seriously mishandled many loan modifications — miscalculating homeowner income in more than 80 percent of audited cases, for example. Yet, GMAC suffered no penalty. GMAC itself said it hasn’t reversed a single foreclosure as a result of a government audit.

 

 

The documents also reveal that government auditors signed off on GMAC loan-modification denials that appear to violate the program’s own rules, calling into question the rigor and competence of the reviews.

 

Some of the auditors’ mistakes are “appalling,” said Diane Thompson of the National Consumer Law Center, an advocacy group. “It suggests the government isn’t taking the auditing process seriously.”

 

In a written response to ProPublica questions, a spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, which runs the program, denied there were serious flaws in its oversight system, calling it “effective and unprecedented in many ways.”

I'm a fan of this one.

For instance, the December 2009 review said that 35 of the 247 loans that auditors reviewed were denied because the homeowner was “less than 60 days delinquent.” In the report, auditors said that was the right decision in all but one case. But being less than 60 days delinquent is never on its own a legitimate reason for a servicer to deny a modification, according to the program rules. Homeowners are eligible for a modification even if they’re current on their loans, as long as they can show they’re in imminent danger of defaulting.

 

Another example: Auditors agreed that GMAC had correctly denied a homeowner because of a failure to sign a trial modification offer by Dec. 31, 2012, HAMP’s end date. That makes no sense, because the review took place in 2009. Treasury’s spokeswoman said this was a typo and that the homeowner was denied for a completely different reason.

 

There are several other examples in later reports of auditors signing off on denial reasons that have no apparent basis in the program’s rules. For instance, auditors cited “grandfathered foreclosure” as a legitimate reason for some denials. The spokeswoman said such loans had been in the foreclosure process before GMAC signed up for the program, but the program rules explicitly stated at the time that such loans were eligible.

 

When ProPublica asked GMAC if it had denied homeowners loan modifications for these reasons, the company said it couldn’t comment because auditors, not GMAC, had generated those descriptions of why homeowners had been denied. In some cases, Proia said, the descriptions were simply wrong: GMAC had never denied homeowners simply because they weren’t 60 days delinquent.

[NorthSideSox72]

Oops.

 

http://www.tradersmagazine.com/news/shorti...=tm_xtra_100411

 

While I 100% agree with you that short selling bans are useless, the methodology of the study is also 100% worthless. Of course the financials with short sale bans went down more than the ones without - if they were chosen to have the protection, they are by nature the weakest links, and furthermore having the ban on them at all signals further weakness. This is a perfect example of invalid interperetation of data.

 

 

This program was entirely set up and run by this administration, out of TARP funds, with no Congressional input to how it was run. Therefore...this is entirely on them...and it's probably my single biggest issue with them. Their failure here has helped make sure there won't be any housing recovery for a whiel.

I'm a fan of this one.

 

No doubt at all, ObamaCo completely screwed the pooch with this program. No one else to blame.

 

[StrangeSox]

It was, arguably, the most important thing to get right.

[NorthSideSox72]

It was, arguably, the most important thing to get right.

And, like the Fin Reg issues, it was very much something they could control. And they screwed it up. Obama has turned out, so far, to be a poor executive (note that I did not say President - I said executive, as being the CEO of the executive branch of government is one aspect of the job).

 

[southsider2k5]

That giant sucking sound you say? That would be Europe.

 

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/artic...ff1a9.2c1German coalition rebels to hold euro fund vote

(AFP) – 5 hours ago

 

BERLIN — Rebels from German Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition partners, the Free Democrats, have collected enough signatures to force a party vote on the EU's permanent bailout fund, they announced Tuesday.

 

FDP member Frank Schaeffler, one of the most prominent rebels, said on his website that 3,650 signatures had been gathered, or 350 more than necessary to force a party vote on an issue.

 

Contrary to the pro-business FDP party's leadership, the rebels want a vote on Germany's participation in the European Stability Mechanism, the EU's permanent bailout fund supposed to be in place by 2013.

 

The motion will be handed to FDP General Secretary Christian Lindner on Monday, Schaeffler said.

 

"The FDP is the only party in Germany which is allowing its members to decide about the right way out of the debt crisis," he added.

 

Press reports said the vote could be held by December, adding the party's leadership was expected to submit a counter-proposal in the coming weeks in a bid to block the rebels.

 

The ESM is due to replace the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), which was set up after a first Greek bailout in May 2010 in an effort to stop the eurozone debt crisis from spreading.

 

On Thursday, German lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to expand the 440-billion-euro ($599 billion) EFSF despite fears of a major backbench rebellion.

[StrangeSox]

Bruce Bartlett on the "Regulatory Uncertainty" canard