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The Obama administration, already under fire for the IRS scandal and National Security Agency snooping of the computers and cellphones of Americans, is also spending millions to have private contractors conduct a dragnet for confidential and personal credit and bank transactions without a warrant. Newly obtained documents from the Obama-created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reveal that the administration has OK'd a project to accumulate the personal financial data of some 5 million and share it with other agencies to build a "nationally representative panel of credit information on consumers for use in a wide range of policy research projects." The...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: You remember, ladies and gentlemen, I can't tell you the number of times it has become a major discussion topic for callers when banks have raised the ATM fee. People go nuts. They e-mailed me and called and talked about what a bunch of rotten creeps the banks were, "Why does there have to be a fee on the ATM anyway? I'm already paying this bank out the wazoo." Well, sit tight because your bank is going to jack up your debit card fee. "Bank of America customers with basic checking accounts will be hit with a...

“Call it Dodd-Frank Inc. A year after Congress passed the broadest financial overhaul since the Great Depression, the law has spawned a host of new businesses to help Wall Street comply — and capitalize — on the hundreds of new regulations. Besides the lawyers, there are legions of corporate accountants, financial consultants, risk management advisers, turnaround artists and technology vendors all vying for their cut.” “It is a full-employment act,” said Gregory J. Lyons, a partner at Debevoise, where a team of a half-dozen lawyers has drafted 30-plus comment letters in the last six months. “The law is passed, but...

The Dodd-Frank Act goes on for 2,319 pages. Like Nancy Pelosi's "pass it to find out what's in the O'care Bill" statement, Senator Dodd said, "No one will know until this is actually in place how it works. But we believe we've done something that has been needed for a long time. It took a crisis to bring us to the point where we could actually get this job done." The Wall Street Journal reported on July 14, 2010, just one week before Obama signed Dodd-Frank into law that it will "unleash the biggest wave of new federal financial rule-making...

While the dominant topic of conversation when discussing margin hikes (or reductions) usually reverts to silver, ES (stocks) and TEN (bonds), what everyone so far is ignoring is the far more critical topic of real margin risk, in the form of roughly $600 trillion in OTC derivatives. The issue is that while the silver market (for example) is tiny by comparison, it is easy to be pushed around, and thus exchanges can easily represent the illusion that they are in control of counterparty risk (after all, that was the whole point of the recent CME essay on why they hiked...