TARP for Rating Agencies
Posted: 19 Jun 2009 06:15 AM PDT

I would have thought that the credit rating agencies would be at least one group that everyone could agree to throw under the bus. We know that the powerful chieftains of Wall Street are trying to pin the credit crisis on rating agencies – see page 3 of JPMorgan’s blame-shifting attempt, for example. Yet the new Financial Regulatory Reform plan has almost nothing on the subject. Apparently the rating agencies, too, are Too Big to Fail. Read more…

TARP for Regulators!
Posted: 19 Jun 2009 04:00 AM PDT

We’ve had TARP for banks, TARP for auto companies, and now, with the Obama Administration’s plan for financial regulatory reform, we have TARP for regulators. After AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, and General Motors, the administration has decided that all the existing regulators are Too Big to Fail – except for the Office of Thrift Supervision, which must play the role of poor Lehman Brothers in this saga. (Actually, they are more like Merrill Lynch, since they are getting merged into the new National Bank Supervisor, so most of them will probably keep their jobs.) Read more…