Update 333: Bronx Cheer for Amazon in Queens City Loses Site in Firm’s Preemptive Break-Up In honor of the opening of spring training, we pause to remember the words of Casey Stengel, manager of the New York Mets, who played and mostly lost, compiling the worst record in baseball history in 1962, in Queens: “Come …
Update 332 — The BB&T/SunTrust Merger: Bank Consolidation Gains, Thanks to S. 2155? Virtually every major sector and industry in the American economy has seen increasing concentration and reduced competition over the last several decades and banking is no exception. Trump era deregulation has accelerated this trend and last year’s S. 2155 and its implementing …
Update 330 — House Fin. Services Drilldown: Subcommittee Chairs, Members, Agendas Chairwoman Maxine Waters and the House leadership have announced assignments for House Financial Services Subcommittee seats in the 116th Congress. No less than a dozen freshmen, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Katie Porter of California, have landed spots on prominent subcommittees, such as …
Update 329 — Access to Financial Services:Survey of Public Banking Bills in Congress Before long, the winter will lift and we will see a thousand flowers bloom in the marketplace of policy ideas over the spring, with the first official presidential primary debates to follow in June. Among the most far-reaching economic policy proposals surfacing …
Update 328 — Bicoastal Bids in Big BattleAs 2020 Contest of the Tax Proposals Unfolds It’s a classic match-up — East Coast vs. West Coast, familiar champion vs. lesser-known challenger, with the biggest stakes on the line. Talking New England Patriots, the L.A. Rams, and Sunday’s Super Bowl? Yes, but also the first big-ticket economic …
Affordable housing has increasingly become a contradiction, as many people are priced out of the property market or struggle with sky-high rents. The issue is a high priority item for House Financial Services Chair, Maxine Waters. Many new freshmen on the House Financial Services Committee have backgrounds in housing policy. Yesterday, the Trump Administration …
Update 326 — Household Debt Through the Roofas Students, Homeowners, Consumers ReleverageThe growing national appetite for debt is not limited to the federal government or to corporate America, as covered in the previous Update. Households, too, have rediscovered the virtues of debt and they are turning increasingly to nonbank sources of financing. Are we turning …
Update 325 — Economic Groundhog DayNo Shadows; Corporate Debt Clouding Horizon The American debt binge is not limited to the national debt. As we will show below and in the next update, private debt has scaled up in recent years just as precipitously, to mix monetary metaphors. We start today with a look at …
Update 324: Our Systemically Riskiest Markets… Beyond a Shadow of a Notional Doubt The long weekend ahead —or the furlough as the case may be — affords the opportunity to look at the little-understood but vast shadow banking system. Many firms involved in the 2008 financial crisis continue to operate in a relative regulatory void, …
Update 323 — Wall or Nothing WH Stays Aloof Trump Unmoved: Let Them Make Adjustments Before the holiday break, we wrote an update on the budget wranglings over Trump’s border wall. At the time, it looked likely that the government was heading for a partial shutdown. The record-breaking shutdown is now in its 25th day. …
