A quasi-governmental agency that polices the investment industry has come up with a plan to make it simpler for consumers to avoid shady money managers -- but it includes no provisions to make the underlying data available to the public.
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a Self-Regulatory Organization (SRO) that polices the investment industry, was charged to come up with a proposal to make it simpler for consumers to find out whether the broker-dealers and investment advisers they consult have a history of disciplinary problems. This could be anything from multimillion dollar fines levied by authorities to felony counts to ...
Continue readingLawmakers demanding LightSquared docs got campaign money from company’s adversaries
The three GOP House lawmakers who yesterday demanded that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) cough up documents detailing its actions and relationship with wireless telecommunications company LightSquared have gotten ample campaign contributions from the embattled firm's corporate adversaries.
The ongoing saga surrounding LightSquared's efforts to launch a satellite-based 4G network demonstrates that when it comes to spectrum wars, there are monied interests on all sides pushing lawmakers, complicating President Barack Obama's campaign promise to expand the reach of broadband.
AT&T and Verizon figure prominently among the top donors to the three lawmakers who are demanding documents ...
Continue readingRestore our Future spends heavily in states going to the polls soon
The pro-Mitt Romney super PAC, Restore our Future, burned through $4 million in just three days this week on independent expenditures in half a dozen states with upcoming primaries. If it keeps up this rate, the super PAC would spend more than $16 million in the 12 days leading up to Super Tuesday, topping the total it spent in January.
Six states with primaries in the next two weeks--Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, Oklahoma, Michigan, and Tennessee--all saw a spending spike.
In Michigan, where voters go to the polls next week, the super PAC supporting Romney pummeled opponent Rick Santorum with more ...
Continue readingBig banks press financial agencies on Volcker rule
Big banks paid calls on federal financial agencies in the days leading up to Monday's midnight deadline for the public to submit comments on the controversial Volcker rule, a provision of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory legislation meant to prohibit banks from using customers' money to make risky bets on the market.
Bank of America and Morgan Stanley paid visits to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in recent weeks, according to reports of meetings with outside groups that federal financial agencies make available voluntarily.
Last month representatives from the law firm Davis Polk -- which was hired by the Securities ...
Continue readingNo government money to criticize soda, says freshman lawmaker
Outraged that federal stimulus money has been used for local advertisements targeting soda as unhealthy, Rep. Scott DesJarlais, R-Tenn., has introduced the Protecting Foods and Beverages from Government Attack Act, which would make it illegal to use federal funds to criticize a legal food or beverage product.
A member of the House Agriculture Committee, the freshman has collected more than $24,000 from the food and beverage industry, including $4,500 from Steve Ennis, the recently deceased CEO of a local Coca Cola bottling company. Susan Hirschmann, a Coca Cola lobbyist who served as chief of staff to former House ...
Continue readingRevolving door from CFTC to lobbying firm
A former Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) commissioner has gone through the revolving door to the law and lobbying firm firm Patton Boggs, where he'll work as a senior policy advisor, the firm announced Tuesday.
"Regulatory agencies should be accessible to the businesses and industries they regulate," said Michael Dunn, the former commissioner, in a statement today. "I am excited to join the firm, and I look forward to helping clients navigate complex regulatory processes and agencies."
Appointed to the CFTC by former President George W. Bush, Dunn specialized in agricultural issues at the agency. His new employer is ...
Continue readingRevolving door boosts private equity lobbying
The Private Equity Growth Capital Council has a new president with Democratic credentials who has been through Washington's revolving door.
Steven Judge won the job after serving since last year as interim head of the trade group, which, among other things, lobbies against proposals to increase taxes on carried interest. Those proposals have gained steam in recent weeks because of revelations that carried interest enabled GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney to keep his tax rate lower than that paid by many Americans who made considerably less.
Before coming to the council, Judge worked for 14 years as the lead ...
Continue readingDespite Fed’s steps toward transparency, much remains opaque
In a bid to increase transparency, the Federal Reserve will for the first time make public the forecasts for benchmark interest rates that will inform discussions at tomorrow's meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which sets monetary policy for the nation. But despite this action, there is still plenty of opacity in how the Fed conducts business.
For starters, the Fed delays release of the actual transcripts of these meetings for five years. While the FOMC releases minutes of these meetings three weeks after the fact, the most recent full transcript currently available is for December 12 ...
Continue readingRegulators lobbied by industry testify on Volcker rule
Federal regulators have had at least 89 meetings with outside groups, most of them big banking interests, about the controversial "Volcker rule," the provision in the Dodd-Frank financial law that prohibits banks from making bets with their own money. The effort to curb the practice, widely held to be a contributor to the 2008 financial meltdown, was the subject of a hearing in Congress today.
Representatives of the same agencies that met with these outside interests testified that the Volcker rule would be difficult to implement. "One of the more difficult tasks in implementing the statutory prohibitions is distinguishing between ...
Continue readingData lacking on private student loans
With student debt rising to a projected $1 trillion and concerns rising in the Occupy Wall Street movement and beyond about the bursting of the student loan bubble, the new federal consumer protection agency has set a Tuesday deadline for the public to send in data and stories about the rapidly expanding private student loan market—loans students are getting from banks and, increasingly, by for-profit universities such as Corinthian Colleges and DeVry University.
“The private student loan market is one of the least understood credit markets,” wrote Rick Hackett, a staffer for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in ...
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