Update 349 — Today’s Leveraged Loan Market: Animal Spirits or 2020 Recessionary Canary? The leveraged loan market may not sound like a factor in the 2020 elections, but 18 months before the 2008 election, leverage was already off the dial, Wall Street was booming, and no one predicted the economic or electoral consequences. Odds that …
Update 345 — HFSC Megabank CEO Hearing:Private Custodians of Public Systemic Risk The CEOs of the nation’s biggest financial institutions will meet on Capitol Hill tomorrow for the first time since the financial crisis for a House Financial Services Committee hearing. The purpose of this unusual gathering is to hold the firms these CEOs lead …
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 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 …
