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The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, sarcastically known as Dodd-Frankery and Dodd-Frankenstein, was passed into law in response to the financial crisis and recession of 2008. It contains the most drastic changes to financial regulations since the regulatory reform after the Great Depression. Proposed by Obama in 2009 and signed into law in 2010, the Democratic bill was the handiwork of former Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) in the House and former Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) in the Senate. It was supposedly going to stop banks from making loans to risky buyers who...

The troubled launch of Health Care.gov has raised plenty of questions about whether young, healthy people will enroll in coverage—and, if they don't, whether insurance companies will have to raise their premiums or give up on Obama- care's new insurance markets altogether. But the law's authors built in a safety net to help guard against that worst-case scenario. In essence, it's an insurance policy for insurance companies. The backstop is an approach known as the "three R's." And health care experts say that, taken together, the three prongs will help insurers not only grapple with the transition to the new...

Amazing stuff via Mediaite. The “Keep Your Plan Act” is Fred Upton’s bill, which Jay Carney spent a few minutes attacking at today’s press briefing because it would make canceled plans available to all consumers, not just the ones who’d been enrolled in those plans before. That would be a disaster for the insurance industry. Healthy people would flee the new, more expensive plans for the resurrected cheaper ones, leaving no one in the new risk pool except sick people with very expensive treatments. That means either heavy losses for insurers, steep premium hikes next year to make up the...

Either version of the law (Upton’s or Landrieu’s) likely creates an adverse selection problem that will further hurt the insurance industry, which let’s recall, was in bed with the administration on Obamacare because of all the new customers that would be required to buy its product. Obamacare has, with an impressive combination of incompetence and irony, seemingly been optimized to create a death spiral. But is it logistically possible for people to keep their plans? For insurance companies to reinstate them? John McCormack at the Weekly Standard: With millions of Americans losing their health insurance because of Obamacare, bills have...

So I am sitting here contemplating some business decisions and doing my forecasting for 2014. Suddenly it occurs to me the insurance companies must have done the same thing and expected a certain amount of customers and revenue relative to each spend. Bit...here it comes....this forecasts are crap since ObamaCare® website doesn't make it easy to acquire a customer and in fact, it impedes utilization. How are the presidents of these companies going to explain their churn and a funnel that operates more like a sieve ?

A blunt critique from Bill Clinton on President Obama's handling of the rocky ObamaCare rollout is prompting the White House to pledge another set of health law fixes -- though in doing so, it could inadvertently build the case for those calling for a delay in the law's implementation. Aside from scrambling to fix the broken HealthCare.gov website, the administration is now trying to deal with the millions of Americans who have received cancellation notices. On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said the president's team is trying to figure out a way to offer relief to some of...

It’s not so easy to repair the White House’s broken promise that millions of consumers would be able to keep their insurance coverage under Obamacare, according to several health and insurance industry experts. President Barack Obama apologized Thursday to the Americans who are losing their coverage despite his pledge and has ordered aides to look into options to try to fix the problem. But there are no obvious solutions that would restore their plans without significantly disrupting the insurance market. -snip- The White House is “just reacting to one broken promise by imposing a much larger and harmful one: our...

While all eleven minutes of Obama’s apocalyptic “government shutdown” speech is well within the definition of “disingenuous”, there was one mundane comment that demands attention. The comment was more or less a throwaway line, aimed at illustrating the gravity of a government shutdown. Startling, the President uttered a fact during his 11 minutes of blaming Republicans. The Federal Government is, in fact, the largest employer in America. “The federal government is America's largest employer” Obama reminded the press as he launched into a childish explanation of Keynesian economics. And now, some of those “non-essential” employees might be getting furloughed. (Inexplicably,...

The U.S. government is starting another phase of selling off its General Motors stock after cutting its stake in the automaker to just over 7 percent. The Treasury Department says it still owns 101.3 million GM shares. It got 912 million shares, a 60.8 percent stake in the company, in exchange for a $49.5 billion bailout of GM in 2009. So far taxpayers have recovered about $36 billion. That means they’re still around $13.5 billion in the hole. …

The European Commission wants to create a new financial backstop for ailing banks from its member countries that do not use the euro currency. The 17 EU countries that use the euro have a €500 billion fund, called the European Stability Mechanism, that they can tap to help rescue troubled banks. But the other 11 members, which include Britain, Poland and Hungary, do not. For those countries, the Commission, the 28-nation EU’s executive arm, is proposing to use an existing €50 billion ($68 billion) fund currently being used as a backstop for countries experiencing a balance-of-payment crisis, Commission spokesman Simon...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), alarmed that big banks are getting bigger, says she has a plan to bust them apart. To prevent another financial crisis, Warren wants to revive portions of the Banking Act of 1933, dubbed Glass-Steagall, a law passed after the Great Depression to separate commercial banking from investment banking. “Banking should be boring,” she told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Friday. … Warren said her effort to pass a 21st century Glass-Steagall Act has the support of Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash), and Angus King (I-Maine). … Why didn’t the separation of commercial and investment banking...

Corzine off the crook - No criminal charges It’s official. Jon Corzine will not be cuffed over MF Global’s improper handling of customers’ funds leading up to the commodity brokerage firm’s spectacular collapse in late 2011, The Post has learned. Federal investigators have found no evidence that the disgraced Wall Street titan broke the law. “After 18 months of investigation, the criminal probe into Jon Corzine is now being dropped,” a person with knowledge of the probe told The Post. “There is no evidence of criminal wrongdoing,” this person said. The Justice Department’s decision to drop the case is sure...

It will take "something very, very major" to get the UK out of its economic "depression", the Archbishop of Canterbury has said. A "severe" economic crisis and "a breakdown in confidence" made for "a generational problem", the Most Rev Justin Welby said. "Recapitalising at least one of our major banks" and breaking it up into regional banks could help, he said. He was speaking at a Bible Society-organised event at Westminster. The former oil executive is on Parliament's banking standards commission and his comments come days before the release of gross domestic product figures that are expected to show the...

NEW YORK (AP) — A New York judge has approved Bank of America's $2.43 billion settlement of a class action lawsuit brought by shareholders over the company's acquisition of former competitor Merrill Lynch. A judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Manhattan approved the settlement Friday. The bank proposed the settlement in late September. The agreement resolves allegations that Bank of America did not disclose the state of its finances or those of Merrill Lynch when it agreed to buy Merrill in September 2008. Judge Kevin Castel said the settlement was "hard fought," but called the...

Indian tribes seek federal bailout money for casinos A native-American tribe struggling to keep its Foxwoods Resort Casino in the red is now turning to the U.S. government for a helping hand. The Associated Press reports that the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation has already received more than $4.5 million in grants from the Department of Health and Human Services and from the Interior Department in the last five years. But now members are facing tough times with its casino — which used to be a billion-dollar empire — and are looking at the government for more grants, AP says. Critics...

We are to blame for this because we failed to demand and enforce a stop to this crap of un-margined derivative exposure that is "off book" and unsupervised on a daily basis, unlike positions in the futures and stock markets. I have been calling for "pulling the fuse" on this bomb since I started The Ticker for this very reason. The banks have hundreds of trillions of "gross" exposure in these instruments and while that grossly overstates the actual risk the fact of the matter is that these institutions have not and cannot post margin against these positions as they...

In fact, U.S. stocks might be solidly in the green now if it weren’t for another development that bears watching: Weakness in financials. Monday's slide is also being attributed to Cyprus, which has revived fears of "contagion" emanating from Europe and the related counterparty risk faced by banks. But bank stocks were under pressure before the Cyprus "bail in" hit the headlines. Starting late Thursday, the financials had a really bad weekend when a Senate report found JPMorgan had misled regulators (and investors) in its disclosures surrounding the now infamous London Whale trade.

While the US Senate takes on Too-Big-To-Fail banks, other economic news hit the wires. First, the University of Michigan Survey of Consumer Confidence Sentiment fell to 71.8 and has not been above 80 last seen in 2007. Industrial production rose 0.7% in February and capacity utilization rose to 79.6%. Not quite 80%, but getting really close. But notice that the peaks of capacity utilization are falling. But the big news today was the Senate hearing on JPMorganChase and its CEO Jamie Dimon. JPMorgan Report Ignites Debate on Bank Size By Dawn Kopecki, Clea Benson and Hugh Son JPMorgan Chase &...

If you’re an amoral person with political connections, it’s possible to make a lot of money. Warren Buffett lined his pockets by making a government-subsidized investment in Goldman Sachs during the financial crisis.The rest of us suffered and he got richer, but the left seems to be okay with that perverse form of redistribution because he supports class-warfare tax hikes. Sort of like buying an indulgence in the Middle Ages.Hey, nice work if you can get it.But Buffett may be an amateur compared to the crony capitalists at Citigroup.The just-confirmed Treasury Secretary Jack Lew was given a huge bonus for...

Bartiromo Takes Frank to Task Over Lack of ’08 Financial Crisis Prosecutions • Frank: 'Individuals' should be prosecuted on Wall Street, will not say who Former Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank (D., Mass.) advocated criminal prosecutions against “individuals” involved in the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent collapse on Wall Street Friday on CNBC. Maria Bartiromo reacted incredulously to Frank’s refusal to name specific individuals who may have perpetrated criminal wrongdoing, accusing the former Congressman of playing populist politics by making specious allegations against the financial industry. Frank attempted to deflect the criticism by stating as Chair of House Financial Services...