Many Americans are understandably unsettled by news reports about the National Security Agency’s widespread monitoring of telephone and Internet traffic. Attracting far less attention is the rampant snooping of a more personalized nature carried out daily by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The two-year-old agency created by the Dodd–Frank …
In an unusual left–right pairing, Senators Sherrod Brown (D–OH) and David Vitter (R–LA) last week introduced legislation to increase capital requirements on large banks. Calling it the “Terminating Bailouts for Taxpayer Fairness” or TBTF Act, the legislation is aimed at ending another TBTF: the doctrine of “too big to fail.” …
Do the risks from the Federal Reserve’s trillion-dollar annual stimulus program justify the rewards? That was the central question at Tuesday’s Senate Banking Committee hearing featuring Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. Bernanke worked hard to defend the Fed’s quantitative easing policy, but he appears to oversell the rewards by a mile …
Free checking accounts, once considered common, are becoming increasingly rare as the enormous costs of new regulations hit banks’ bottom lines. According to the just released 2012 Checking Survey by Bankrate, Inc., a publisher of financial information, only 39 percent of banks continue to offer free checking accounts, a sharp …
The now defunct Countrywide Financial Corp. issued hundreds of discounted loans to government officials and Fannie Mae employees in order to build clout with influential policymakers, a new House report shows. The report, issued by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, details several Countrywide VIP loans that were given …
JPMorgan Chase’s announcement that it has lost $2 billion in a failed hedge strategy sent shock waves through the financial world yesterday. And in Washington, the reaction has had a political tone, with calls to accelerate adoption of the “Volcker Rule” limiting investments by banks. But policymakers should take a …
