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This is a post from John Lounsbury.
Charles J. Antonucci Sr., the former president and chief executive of the Park Avenue Bank of New York, made a desperate move to try to save his bank with the infusion of TARP funds. TARP refers to the government program to provide up to $780 billion in loans and [...]

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Mortgage fraud was rampant during the housing boom. Regulators were asleep at the wheel during all of this. But now we are getting some indictments as WFAA News 8 in Dallas reports (hat tip Housing Wire). This television station did the dirty work for regulators and uncovered massive amounts of mortgage fraud.
Byron Harris reports:
News 8 [...]

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This is the third in a series of posts about ideas for financial reform generated by the “Make Markets Be Markets” conference I attended yesterday in New York City on 3 Mar 2010. You can download all of the written presentations here.
A century ago, anyone with a bathtub and some chemicals could mix and sell [...]

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Apparently, some of the ‘best reforms’ now being instituted in the U.S. to prevent a liquidity crisis in the future include limitations on demand deposits (hat tip Karl Denninger). What financial institutions are trying to prevent is a bank run in whatever form it can take – via depositors in the case of IndyMac and [...]

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In the wake of the most recent Matt Taibbi polemic “Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle,” I think the video below about financial fraud is appropriate viewing. I liked the Taibbi piece – although it certainly had a certain over-the-top gonzo feel to it which Taibbi’s detractors use to discredit his work. However, Taibbi was very much [...]

Update: 2010-02-24. The Wall Street Journal has picked up on this theme. See Wealthy Greeks Send Money Abroad. The point is that the taxation rules are not necessarily going to increase taxes. They will, however, increase capital flight.

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See also Supreme Court Ruling Spurs Corporation Run for Congress First Test of “Corporate Personhood” In Politics. 
Watch out Chris Van Hollen. We’ve got a new ‘person’ in the hunt for Maryland’s 8th district. That’s my Congressional District.

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I just received this document from an interested reader. It is a request by Congressman Darrell Issa for a subpoena to be issued in order to facilitate the investigation surrounding the AIG cover-up. Apparently, evidence has now surfaced about Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke’s role in the AIG saga that is germane to this issue. [...]

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In November 2008, the SEC approved a request by American International Group (AIG) to keep secret until November 2018 documents which reveal securities behind the brewing scandal over its bailout by the Federal Reserve.
A copy of the SEC’s order revealed that the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance ordered this "excluded information" not to be [...]

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This comes from Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review:
Whatever Tim Geithner’s New York Fed was trying to hide in the AIG backdoor bailout was so volatile it was deemed worthy of national-security-like classification, and the Fed reacted to media FOIA requests for information by withholding more information.
Reuters, gets the scoop on emails that detail [...]