Every schoolboy ought to know—but probably doesn’t—the famous couplet from Rudyard Kipling’s “Tommy”: “Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep / Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap.” George Orwell, though he held that Kipling did not “understand the…
Companies doing business with Iran risk U.S. sanctions unless they take heightened measures to avoid benefiting sanctioned entities like the Iranian military, according to a State Department statement provided to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. The warning contradicts remarks made by Secretary of State John…
When you buy a shirt and the shopkeeper tries to sell you a necktie, that's cross-selling. When you pick up your to-eat-at-the-desk sandwich and the guy at the register persuades you that you need some potato chips, that's cross-selling. When thousands of Wells Fargo employees respond to pressure…
Recent news that Wells Fargo employees had opened as many as two million unauthorized customer bank and credit card accounts since 2011 was shocking. The bank fired 5,300 workers and agreed to pay $185 million in fines to the Los Angeles City Attorney, the Comptroller of the Currency, and the…
"Democrats believe that we need to give Americans affordable banking options, including by empowering the United States Postal Service to facilitate the delivery of basic banking services." That's a statement on page twelve of the 2016 Democratic party platform. At first I thought it was a joke—a…
There ariseth a little cloud out of Minneapolis, smaller than the hand of a central banker, but worrying nevertheless. Neel Kashkari, newly appointed president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, wants to break up the big banks. Kashkari has taken to introducing himself with an…
This is not a good time to be a banker. Any kind of banker. Our central bankers are alternately accused of having kept interest rates too low for too long, and of raising them too soon. Overseas they are accused of being unable to drive down their currency so as to rescue an economy from decades of…
Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren had some praise this morning for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
All bad things must come to end has been the hope of the banking industry for these past eight years. Now it seems that time has come. In the past week or so just about everything has been coming up roses for America’s banks. JPMorgan Chase delivered second quarter earnings that “beat the Street”,…
All bad things must come to end has been the hope of the banking industry for these past eight years. Now it seems that time has come. In the past week or so just about everything has been coming up roses for America’s banks. JPMorgan Chase delivered second quarter earnings that “beat the Street”,…
Today, in an economic speech at the New School in Manhattan, Hillary Clinton spoke out against short-term traders.
The conventional wisdom is that he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance--and maybe that's true. But Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign does have some people looking over their shoulders. Those people would be, as Kevin Cirilli of The Hill reports, the big bankers who are, in Sanders’ world view,…
So all’s well. No more financial meltdowns. No more taxpayer bailouts of bonus-hunting, risk-taking bankers. The Federal Reserve Board’s regulators have decided that all 31 of the largest U.S. banks, including seven that are foreign-owned, would survive a severe recession with sufficient capital to…
The former constituents who returned Eric Cantor to the private sector have reason to think, He is who we thought he was. As Mario Trujillo of The Hill reports:
Bank of America likes to top rival J.P. Morgan Chase in as many ways as possible. Except one. The $16-to-$17 billion check it is about to write to cover the fine for sins committed before the financial crisis tops the previous record of $13 billion paid by J.P. Morgan Chase just nine months ago.…
Agence France-Presse State Department correspondent Jo Biddle is claiming on Twitter that members of the media traveling with Secretary of State John Kerry to China "have had their bank accounts hacked."
Here we go again. JPMorgan Chase will pay $2.6 billion in fines and compensation for its inattention to numerous red flags warning that its important customer, one Bernie Madoff, was running a $65 billion Ponzi scheme. Among other things, JP Morgan Chase failed to notify the authorities that it had…
Free traders are ecstatic. Negotiators at the 9th World Trade Organization ministerial conference in Bali cheered, hugged, and wept at what they see as the successful culmination of their recent round of talks. “A giant step for businesses large and small,” enthused the CEO of UPS. The…
Janet Yellen, dubbed “Ms. QE Infinity” by some wags because of her support for printing money to create jobs, and her willingness to pierce the Fed’s long-held 2 percent annual inflation ceiling, will have more to worry about than monetary policy when she steps into Ben Bernanke’s ample shoes on…
The Brookings Institution might have been a little harsh on Senator Elizabeth Warren's plan to reduce student loan interest rates:
President Obama will be meeting today with people one of his predecessors might call "malefactors of great wealth." According to Dawn Kopecki & Margaret Talev of Bloomberg, visitors to the White House will include:
At the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney points to JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon's admission in an interview that the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law makes it "tougher for smaller players to enter the market." Dimon says the law widens the "moat" that surrounds big banks like JPMorgan and keep smaller…
Sandy Weill is calling for the banks to be broken up. Bloomberg reports:
James Pethokoukis, writing at AEI Ideas:
Disclosure forms reveal that Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a member of Congress from Florida, previously held funds with investments in Swiss banks, foreign drug companies, and the state bank of India. This revelation comes mere days after the Democratic chair…
Frank Keating, the president and CEO of the American Bankers Association and former two-term governor of Oklahoma, writes this letter to the editor in response to James Pethokoukis's recent WEEKLY STANDARD article "Too Big for Comfort."
This story got me thinking about the GOP's complicated relationship with the big banks:
The tide sweeping from Greece across Europe and into the United States is washing away support for austerity, in some cases reinforcing opposition to it, largely from the left. President Obama is delighted at this support for his refusal to cut spending in the face of mounting deficits, and the…
According to just released disclosure forms, President Barack Obama has between $500,000-1,000,000 in assets in a JP Morgan Chase account. The full title of the account, as it's written on the disclosures, is "JPMorgan Chase Private Client Asset Mgmt Checking Account." It is a jointly held account,…
Most administrations are a bit reluctant to pass regulations that anger prominent members of their own party, but President Obama apparently has no qualms doing so. Last week the administration announced the final version of a regulation that will require depository institutions to report interest…
Tom Maguire: "Their gist seems to be that the 'less government' crowd is a bunch of hypocrites, but there is a glaring problem with their numbers."
There are a number of pricey regulations that have received attention of late: net neutrality, new ozone standards, countless regulations stemming from the passage of the Dodd-Frank bill. These rules typically garner a mention in the Wall Street Journal, a formal Office of Information and…
President Obama's first chief of staff Rahm Emanuel once sat on the board of troubled federal mortgage giant Freddie Mac. Bill Daley, the president's chief of staff whose departure was announced today, was previously a top executive at financial firm J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. So of course there…
Capital New York: "Bloomberg: ‘Plain and simple,’ Congress caused the mortgage crisis, not the banks"
Wall Street Journal: "Infrastructure Likely Part of Obama Jobs Push"