Say what you will about Liz Warren, she knows how to give the feckless bank regulators hell on camera. It’s kinda funny that a Senate hearing is blowing up on YouTube, but here we are. It's hilarious how not one bank regulator can cite a single case of a Wall Street bank being brought to trial. It’s no secret that I have a lot of respect and admiration for Warren, which I realize is not a popular opinion on Wall Street. But you have to give credit where credit is due, and she’s definitely a bigger asset on the Senate Banking Committee than we’ve seen in a long time. Give 'em hell, Doc:

For a company with close to $100 billion AUM and a legacy which spanned Wall Street’s most profitable decades, Carlyle is flying mighty low beneath the radar these days. After several false starts, the Carlyle IPO seems back on track and set for a Q3 kick off.

Oddly enough… it seems as though nobody cares. Further evidence that there is no such thing as a living legend on Wall Street. Once the wet dream of every incoming analyst, Carlyle has become just another PE behemoth. Hoping it can cash in assets whose values have recently tumbled from heaven to earth. It is hard to argue that Carlyle and other mega mega funds didn’t miss their greatest IPO moment. The real question is… how much did they miss out on?

The Troubled Asset Relief Program. Let's take a deep breath and discuss, calmly.
As our work week begins on Monday, the most controversial and highest impact piece of legislation of our recent times, will come to an end.

Top financial regulators met yesterday to break ground on a new council designed to prevent the need for more government bailouts. The anger sparked by the bailout has created a strange sort of "new normal" in regards to the public's view of government intervention and Wall Street shenanigans. Messrs Gross and El-Erian surely didn't know they were coining such a far reaching term at the time they first began to trumpet it.

Den of Thieves is required reading from Wall Street Lit 101.

Over the years, the term has become synonymous with the greed and villainy Wall Street either inspires in or extracts from people (depending on your perspective).

A new den of thieves has emerged on the American landscape, however. It is a den of the vilest scum and purest filth, for it does not acknowledge or recognize its own malice...choosing instead to bleed dry those it purports to protect.

America's Sodom, the heart of Pentapolis. Or as we...the financiers of our own suffering call it, Washington D.C.

A federal appeals court has sided with a lower court ruling forcing the Federal Reserve to disclose the names of banks that would have collapsed had they not been bailed out. The Fed has obstructed this required disclosure every step of the way, citing concerns that disclosing the names of the banks will stigmatize them and cause them competitive injury.

God, I hope so.

This court ruling is a big win for the free market, and might clear the path for poorly managed banks to see their stock prices get pummeled. Maybe some heads will even roll. That said, I don't really expect the Fed to hand the data over. I'm sure they were willing to play along with the due process charade to keep up appearances, but now that the court has ruled against them more than once, I fully expect the Fed to give the judiciary a lesson in who's really the boss -- rule of law be damned.

Pander much?

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is apparently having second thoughts about the way he threw his weight behind the Wall Street bailout in 2008. Facing a tough re-election bid, he is claiming that he was "misled" by everyone and their brother leading up to the vote on the critical bill.

This is sickening on several different levels. You probably remember that he made a huge show of "suspending my campaign" to wing back to Washington and save the day. He claims that Bernanke and Paulson lied to him and said that the housing crisis was what the rescue was all about. While there was plenty of lying to go around, no one at any policy level ever suggested the bailout bill would help the housing crisis. Sorry, John. Thanks for playing, please try again.

Elizabeth Warren, the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard and Chairperson of the Congressional Oversight Panel on TARP, is convinced America's middle class is disappearing and outlines her case on the matter here. After reading her piece, I was instantly struck by something G.K. Chesterton wrote about 80 years ago in The Outline of Sanity. It is perhaps the best definition of capitalism I've ever come across:

I love how he acts surprised that the American taxpayer might have a little something to say after the biggest government handout in the nation's history.

The 7 companies who received the largest amount of TARP assistance have been ordered to cut the salaries of their top 25 employees by an average of 90% from last year. Their all-in pay will be reduced by an average of 50% from last year. The cuts affect Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG, GM, Chrysler, GMAC, and Chrysler Financial.

No one in the Financial Products division of AIG will be paid more than $200,000 total for the year.

It's not often you get two guys from opposite ends of the political spectrum to agree on anything these days. But that very thing occurred this weekend when Obama's chief economic adviser Larry Summers and Clusterstock's Henry Blodget agreed that the best way to reform Wall Street is to allow it to blow itself up.

In a speech at Georgetown on Friday, Summers made the comment, "Our financial system will not be fail-safe until it is safe for failure." and went on to decry the concept of institutions "too big to fail".

http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjec...