Posts Tagged ‘TARP’

Banking and finance roundup

  • Still money left in that piggy bank: Justice Department shakes $1.7 billion out of J.P. Morgan because its custody wing kept handling a primary Bernie Madoff account while a distant equity desk grew suspicious of him, in what “looks a bit like a tax on bigness and integration” [Matt Levine, Bloomberg; NPR].
  • Legacy of TARP one of cronyism and lawlessness [Mark Calabria, USA Today]
  • NYT assails a couple of academics as mouthpieces for Wall Street, Felix Salmon has a bit to say about that [Reuters, EconBrowser, Bainbridge, Pirrong] Daniel Fisher on a possible tie-in with Times reporter David Kocieniewski’s earlier piece flaying Goldman Sachs over aluminum warehousing [Forbes]
  • “Court Receptive to Overturning SEC’s Conflict Minerals Disclosure Rule” [Fed Soc Blog]
  • “Target Breach — Are Dodd-Frank ‘Swipe Fee’ Price Controls to Blame?” [John Berlau, CEI “Open Market”] “Volcker Rule Overshoots Wall Street to Hit Utah” [same]
  • “CFPB and Disparate Impact” [Hester Peirce, Point of Law]
  • “It might cost you $39K to crowdfund $100K under the SEC’s new rules” [Sherwood Neiss, VentureBeat via @jerrybrito]
  • Here’s a novel proposal for corporate governance: use the rules agreed upon by the original parties to the transaction [Hodak]

TARP money to settle shareholder class actions

Freelance journalist Dan Slater in the NYT’s “Dealbook” (via Above the Law) spies a “bailout for the plaintiff’s bar”:

…settlements resulting from the scores of shareholder suits against TARP entities will stretch into the stratosphere.

Sure, through TARP, taxpayer money may be used to pay off mortgages and fund bonus pools. But, in what will amount to a far more expensive proposition, TARP money will also be used to line the pockets of allegedly aggrieved shareholders and the lawyers who, wrapped smugly in the flag of corporate governance, are in the process of making a billion-dollar cottage industry out of filing strike suits.