Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

.  It is appropriate that we ended our last post with Jarkesy .  For without much effort, that can be seen as part of a push by the majority of this court to put the whole regulatory apparatus on a defensive jurisprudential footing. There is some combination here of social darwinism and a fear of the hidden rulers behind the superficial state consisting of well-known politicians.  MAGA as a political movement is an effort to weaponize the superficial against the deep.   Beyond Jarkesy there is the CFPB case, and there is Loper Bright , the case that has finally overturned Chevron.   I would like to focus especially now on :  Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association of America,  aka the CFPB case, published in mid May. CFPB was a loss for the cause of dismantling administrative agencies. A win for the deep state, if you will.  It is not always clear what the word "consumer" means in the financial worl...

  Until quite recently, Robert Litan was a nonresident senior fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, a bipartisan Washington think tank with a sterling reputation. The Institution’s website describes him thus: ”a widely recognized expert in regulation, antitrust, finance, among other policy subjects.” But he is no longer a fellow there, because he had the misfortune to disagree with Senator Elizabeth Warren. No Proper Risk Assessment The subject of the criticism, as it happens, was financial regulation, specifically new rules proposed by the Department of Labor (and supported by Senator Warren) that would impose fiduciary obligations on brokers and financial advisors who provide advice for IRAs.   A fiduciary obligation, of course, would be a big step up from the present level of obligation under SEC authority. The latter holds merely that those recommendations must be “suitable” for investors, judging suitability by income, ass...

Is Senator Sanders actually on to something, or is his campaign, and the fire it seems to be catching at the moment, just a transitory phenomenon? I don't see Sanders becoming President, nor do I see him becoming the next nominee of the Democratic Party. But he does seem to have become a vehicle for something important, for the dissatisfaction with the Clinton machine that has built up within that party. Faced with the notion of Secretary Clinton's inevitability as the nominee, many turned first to Senator Warren. She declined to serve as a vessel, and they have turned now to Bernie. How far will the rebellion go? I don't know, but it could make matters interesting from a poli-sci point of view.

President Obama apparently decided to support the omnibus budget bill late Thursday morning, December 11th. He supported the bill because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told him the threat of a government shutdown in the first quarter of 2015 was otherwise a real one, and the President should act quickly to get that off the table. The next few hours appear to have been hectic ones, as alliances formed and shifted both for and against the bill, across party lines. The bill came to be called "cromnibus," apparently for "Continuing Resolution Omnibus." [Personally my first impression was that the "cr" stood from "cram." Alas not.] At 9:37 Thursday evening, the bill passed the House, 219 to 206. Obama and House Speaker Boehner had both kept enough of their troops in line to get the result they both wanted. The Senate passed it on Saturday night, with a vote of 56 to 40. The 40 who voted "no" included both Elizabeth Warren and Te...

In a quote he offered to  The New York Times, one which was employed in a story that appeared on April 26th,  former US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner suggests a revisionist account of a piece of recent history, the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). Within hours, Neil Barofsky took note of this revisionism. He told his twitter folowers, "Geithner seems to deny account told by both me and @senwarren on HAMP." So I sat up and took notice. Barofsky, a former Treasury official, wrote a book on the rescue of Wall Street, in 2012, simply named, Bailout. HAMP is only one aspect of that book, but Barofsky does describe Geithner in unflattering terms. Geithner saw HAMP not as a way of helping besieged homeowners, but as "an aid to the banks, keeping the full flush of foreclosures from hitting the financial system all at the same time." The idea was to extend and pretend: extend the time in which homeowners are allowed to hang on to the negative-...