Rating Firms Continue to Put Investors at Risk by Rating Unseen Contents of Paper Bags
Moody’s announced it was dropping its unpaid for and unsolicited rating on WeWork’s bonds saying it believes it has insufficient or otherwise... Read More
Central Banks Shape the Financial Markets
While plenty is written about the central banks as bank supervisors or macro-prudential regulators, virtually nothing is written about central banks as... Read More
Senator Warren’s Call to Drain the DC Swamp
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A tremor went through the Opacity Protection Team today when Senator Elizabeth Warren called for ending its capture of the process by... Read More
The UK’s Investment Association and Opacity
The UK’s Investment Association promotes the Opacity Protection Team’s myth quarterly reporting drives management to focus on the short-term at the expense... Read More
RBS Settlement Highlights Need for Transparency Label Initiative
The Statement of Facts released as part of the $4.9 billion RBS subprime mortgage-backed securities settlement with the US Department of Justice... Read More
Obama and the Committee to Save the Banks
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I have always been curious why Obama ran on “Hope and Change” yet continued to pursue the policies to respond to the... Read More
The Committee to Save the Banks Keeps on Protecting the Banks
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As we approach the tenth anniversary of the 2008 acute phase of the Great Financial Crisis, the Committee to Save the Banks... Read More
Economics: The Gap between Brilliant and Useful
Nicholas Gruen, CEO of Lateral Economics, highlighted a major problem with Economics today while talking about Nobel prize winning Economist Paul Krugman: his... Read More
The Fog of Accounting
Accounting standards do not guarantee investors will have access to the information they need in order to know what they own. In... Read More
Can Society Make Finance Servant, Not Master of the Economy?
Since the acute phase of the Great Financial Crisis erupted in September 2008, the response by policymakers has been to save the... Read More
“Transparency: a Necessary, but Not Sufficient Condition…”
Late last week, the Pope cited the need for ethical behavior in finance. To achieve this, he called for restoring transparency across... Read More
Who Do Auditors Serve: Shareholders or Company Executives?
The collapse of Carillion revealed the extent to which the entire system of checks and balances on a public company failed yet... Read More
To Know or Not to Know Should be a Choice
Opacity is an asset class. Prior to the formation of the Transparency Label Initiative, opacity was an unrecognized asset class. There was... Read More
Figuring Out Where the Banks Fit In
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Tim Congdon, Chairman of the Institute of International Monetary Research, laid down the challenge for what the Economics profession needs to learn:... Read More
Pathology, Prophylactics and Palliatives
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Prospect Magazine asked a number of PhD Economists and Economic commentators what is the one lesson they wish Economists would learn. Imagine... Read More