Newshoggers Archive: So it looks like they are doing something

Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.

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Thursday, October 22, 2009

So it looks like they are doing something

Commentary By Ron Beasley

At first glance this might look good:

The Federal Reserve Board on Thursday issued a proposal designed to
ensure that the incentive compensation policies of banking
organizations do not undermine the safety and soundness of their
organizations.
The proposal includes two supervisory initiatives. One,
applicable to 28 large, complex banking organizations, will review each
firm's policies and practices to determine their consistency with the
principles for risk-appropriate incentive compensation set forth in the
proposal. These firm-specific policies will be assessed by supervisors
in a special "horizontal review," a coordinated examination of
practices at the 28 firms. The policies and implementing practices
adopted by these firms in response to the final supervisory principles
will become a part of the supervisory expectations for each firm and
will be monitored for compliance.

And this makes sense:

"Compensation practices at some banking organizations have led to
misaligned incentives and excessive risk-taking, contributing to bank
losses and financial instability," Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S.
Bernanke said. "The Federal Reserve is working to ensure that
compensation packages appropriately tie rewards to longer-term
performance and do not create undue risk for the firm or the financial
system."

But it's just words and words alone don't fix anything. The Fed was unable to do it's job before and I see no reason to believe it will administer this new policy with any diligence. This is simply an attempt to make it look like Washington is doing something so they don't have to do what really needs to be done - reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial banking from investment banking and breaking up the "too big to fail" institutions. Of course that won't happen because we have the same people in charge at Treasury that pushed for the death of Glass-Steagall in 1999.

1 comment:

giantslorOctober 22, 2009 at 6:59 PM
This cynical attitude is really not helpful. Instead of dismissing the federal government as incapable of acting on this, you should be rallying people to demand the government acts effectively.
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