Kevin M. Warsh was sworn in as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on February 24, 2006. He left the Board on March 31, 2011. In 1995, Warsh accepted a position with the mergers and acquisitions department at Morgan Stanley & Co. in New York. In 2002, Warsh left his vice president and executive director post at Morgan Stanley & Co. to join the administration for President George W. Bush. He served as special assistant to the president for economic policy and as executive secretary at the National Economic Council. In addition, he advises several companies including serving on the board of directors of United Parcel Service. He graduated from Stanford University(BA), and went on to Harvard Law School and received a law degree in 1995. He also completed coursework in market economics and debt capital markets at Harvard Business School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.
Subject: Jay Powell
Subject of InterestJerome H. Powell took office as Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on February 5, 2018, for a four-year term. Mr. Powell also serves as Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee. Prior to his appointment to the Board, Powell was a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C. From 1997 through 2005, Powell was a partner at The Carlyle Group. Powell served as an Assistant Secretary and as Under Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury under President George H.W. Bush. Prior to joining the Bush administration, Mr. Powell worked as a lawyer and investment banker in New York City. He received an AB in politics from Princeton University in 1975 and earned a law degree from Georgetown University in 1979. While at Georgetown, he was editor-in-chief of the Georgetown Law Journal.
Article: Naked Gold Shorts: The Hows and Whys of Gold Price Manipulation
Article - MediaNaked Gold Shorts: The Hows and Whys of Gold Price Manipulation
Commodity Trade Mantra, 20 January 2014
The deregulation of the financial system during the Clinton and George W. Bush regimes had the predictable result: financial concentration and reckless behavior. A handful of banks grew so large that financial authorities declared them “too big to fail.” Removed from market discipline, the banks became wards of the government requiring massive creation of new money by the Federal Reserve in order to support through the policy of Quantitative Easing the prices of financial instruments on the banks’ balance sheets and in order to finance at low interest rates trillion dollar federal budget deficits associated with the long recession caused by the financial crisis.
Article: Secrets and Lies of the Bailout
Article - MediaSecrets and Lies of the Bailout
Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone, 4 January 2013
It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you’d think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we’ve been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?
Article: Calling Out the Culprits Who Caused the Crisis
Article - MediaCalling Out the Culprits Who Caused the Crisis
Eric D. Hovde
Washington Post via Wayback, 21 September 2008
Looking for someone to blame for the shambles in U.S. financial markets? As someone who owns both an investment bank and commercial banks, and also runs a hedge fund, I have sat front and center and watched as this mess unfolded. And in my view, there’s no need to look beyond Wall Street — and the halls of power in Washington. The former has created the nightmare by chasing obscene profits, and the latter have allowed it to spread by not practicing the oversight that is the federal government’s responsibility.
Article: Sell-out: Why hedge funds will destroy the world
Article - MediaSell-out: Why hedge funds will destroy the world
Janet Bush
NewStatesman, 31 July 2006
Something ominous is going on in world finance – again. On 11 May, the US Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, raised rates and hinted that it might do so again. Wall Street wobbled but stock markets in the emerging economies fell through the floor. Since that day, Colombia’s stock market has slumped by 42 per cent; Turkey’s by 38 per cent; Pakistan and Egypt by 28 per cent; India by 25 per cent; the Czech Republic by 22 per cent.
Article: Investigator claims he was Fired for Hedge Fund Inquiry
Article - MediaInvestigator claims he was Fired for Hedge Fund Inquiry
Andrew Clark
The Guardian cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 24 June 2006
The low-profile, high-earning world of hedge funds suffered a jolt yesterday as allegations surfaced of political influence and insider dealing at one of America’s most prominent players, Pequot Capital Management.
A former investigator at the Securities and Exchange Commission has disclosed that the authority has been examining suspicious trades at Pequot – a Connecticut-based fund which has $7bn (£3.8bn) under management and operates from offices in both the US and Britain.
Article: SEC: Gone Fishin’
Article - MediaChris Byron
New York Times cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 6 March 2006
It’s good to see that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has come to its senses and that – at least for the time being – it won’t be enforcing the media subpoenas that have gotten the press so riled up.
But before anyone breaks out the pom-poms for SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, let’s remember that these wrong-headed subpoenas were 100 percent the responsibility of Cox’s own agency in the first place – and until the SEC develops better, more focused leadership, problems like those caused by these subpoenas are going to keep occurring.
Article: Who’s Looking Out For You? SEC Critics Seeking Investigation
Article - MediaWho’s Looking Out For You?: SEC Critics Seeking Investigation
Mark Faulk
FaulkingTruth cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 27 June 2004
The mission statement of the SEC is clearly worded and easy to understand: “The primary mission of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is to protect investors and maintain the integrity of the securities market.”
Last Wednesday, they adopted new rules concerning short-selling that accomplished neither goal. Instead, they passed a watered-down version of their earlier proposed regulation SHO, a version that did absolutely nothing to “protect investors and maintain the integrity of the securities market”. And unlike their mission statement, the new rules are neither clearly worded nor easy to understand. In fact, the only clear message was the “subliminal” one that the SEC sent to investors, which was, simply stated: “We don’t care”.