Salient to Investors: William D. Cohan writes: Janet Yellen favors staying the course on QE. Larry Summers apparently prefers to begin winding down QE. The Yellen-Summers debate is the latest example of a decades-long tug-of-war between those inside The Club (Summers) and those excluded from it (Yellen). Almost all of
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: William D. Cohan writes: The appalling but unsurprising news that Robert Khuzami, the former enforcement director at the SEC is joining a prominent Wall Street law firm at a $5 million-plus salary is the latest example of the corrupt relationship between money and power in the US. Senator Carl Levin said this
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: William D. Cohan writes: Senators Elizabeth Warren and John McCain are wrong in believing that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by commercial banks taking undue risks with depositors’ money, though it is true that they courted too much risk, Causes of the financial crisis were many and
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: William D. Cohan writes: Mary Jo White’s SEC is trying to make Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre the poster child for the financial crisis of 2008. This could not be further from the truth. A low-level vice-president such as Tourre has only one responsibility: to do what he is told
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: William D. Cohan writes: What caused the financial crisis remains unheeded and serious trouble is brewing. The debt markets have once again mispriced risk when junk bonds yield a mere 5 percent. Wall Street still suffers from inadequate risk management and improper incentives. Until these problems are
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: within minutes either online William D. Cohan writes: With the expected appointment of Jason Furman as the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, Robert Rubin has completed the remarkable feat of placing 5 of his acolytes in key positions of power in the Obama administration. The
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: William D. Cohan writes: The CFTC voted May 16 for a watered-down compromise over requiring opaque and hard-to-value swaps and derivatives to be traded on an exchange, allowing dealers – essentially the big Wall Street banks – to continue to set the prices for these financial instruments using their black
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: William D. Cohan writes: Paul Krugman is wrong in denigrating David Stockman’s cogent argument that the Fed is fomenting economic trouble. David Stockman is exactly right when he says the Fed has basically become a bubble machine, and almost all of the new money created, $1.7 trillion,
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: William D. Cohan writes: Mary Schapiro, the former chairman of the SEC is joining a firm loaded with former government financial-services regulators. Schapiro previously ran FINRA, Wall Street’s self-appointed watchdog. Alan Blinder at Princeton is a co-founder of Promontory Interfinancial Network which offers Insured Cash Sweep, which splits large deposits into
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: William D. Cohan writes: Hedge-fund managers et al are able to manipulate the market with impunity and make millions. Daniel Loeb’s selling of a big chunk of Herbalife at a price far below what he told investors it was worth is concerning, and taking unfair advantage of
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