Could All Money Transfers Face Anti-terrorism Scrutiny?

The Obama administration wants to require U.S. banks to report all electronic money transfers into and out of the country.It gets to the point where maybe it's all too much. Does it mean that if you're making a money transfer to a family member they will scrutinize it? Is it really necessary to put everyone under the microscope in order to possibly ferret out a few bad guys? Won't they just find a way around the rules? They always do
   . .. . .  June

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Money transfers could face anti-terrorism scrutiny:

The Obama administration wants to require U.S. banks to report all electronic money transfers into and out of the country, a dramatic expansion in efforts to counter terrorist financing and money laundering.

Officials say the information would help them spot the sort of transfers that helped finance the al-Qaeda hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They say the expanded financial data would allow anti-terrorist agencies to better understand normal money-flow patterns so they can spot abnormal activity.

Financial institutions are now required to report to the Treasury Department transactions in excess of $10,000 and others they deem suspicious. The new rule would require banks to disclose even the smallest transfers.

Treasury officials plan to post the proposed regulation on their Web site Monday and in the Federal Register this week. The public could comment before a final rule is published and the plan takes effect, which officials say will probably not be until 2012.

The proposal is a long-delayed response to the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which specified reforms to better organize the intelligence community and to avoid a repeat of the 20S01 attacks. The law required that the Treasury secretary issue regulations requiring financial institutions to report cross-border transfers if deemed necessary to combat terrorist financing.

"By establishing a centralized database, this regulatory plan will greatly assist law enforcement in detecting and ferreting out transnational organized crime, multinational drug cartels, terrorist financing and international tax evasion," said James H. Freis Jr., director of Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).


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Are Insurers Looking For Loopholes in Health Care Reform?

 Isn't it typical that the big insurers that Health Care Reform is trying to protect the public from are trying to figure out ways to get around the bill? According to the following article, it appears that a number of major insurance companies are planning to stop offering 'children-only' plans. Does this mean they would bypass the clause to protect kids under 19 with pre-existing conditions?
   . . . June


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Health care reform starts, insurers look for loopholes
CBS 21 News - Breaking news, sports and weather for the Harrisburg Pennsylvania area:


A wave of changes will start Thursday as the new health care reform takes effect.

Yet, disturbing information is coming out about a number of major insurance companies planning to stop offering 'children-only' plans. A new 'Wall Street Journal' article details a number of big insurers attempting to create a loophole.

The article claims five top insurance companies will no longer sell child-only policies, but children already enrolled in a child-only plan will not be dropped.

When Pres. Obama signed health care reform into law six months ago, one of the new changes was to protect kids under 19 with pre-existing conditions. Under the law, insurers can no longer deny those children insurance. Adults with pre-existing conditions, though, have to wait until 2014.

"We're going to have to make sure the dialogue with the insurance companies is one that they know they have a responsibility for sick kids," said state Sen. Mike Stack (D-Philadelphia).

Stack is the Democratic chairman of the Senate Banking and Insurance Committee. He said that if the federal plan is unable to protect children, it's distressing, so keeping a dialogue with insurers is vital.

"We've been able to get that in the past and we'll be firm on this. But I'm confident we'll have that in the future," said Stack.




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Will Elizabeth Warren Be Wall Street Consumer Watchdog?

 Will Elizabeth Warren fill the post for Wall Street Consumer Watchdog? According to the following article,Warren has served as chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel, a watchdog group for the financial bailout program. She has been championed by many left-wing Democrats, who see her outspokenness, intellect and sarcastic sense of humor a perfect fit to police Wall Street's shenanigans. Sounds good to me!
   . . . June


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White House eyes Elizabeth Warren for Wall Street consumer watchdog post

By Kenneth R. Bazinet DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAUTuesday, September 14th 2010, 1:40 PM

WASHINGTON - The White House is considering its options for naming frontrunner Elizabeth Warren as the government's Wall Street consumer watchdog, sources told the Daily News Tuesday.

Warren has served as chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel, a watchdog group for the financial bailout program. She has been championed by many left-wing Democrats, who see her outspokenness, intellect and sarcastic sense of humor a perfect fit to police Wall Street's shenanigans.

President Obama may still pick someone else to fill the post created by the new financial reform law. But he also is weighing whether to appoint Warren as temporary head of the Treasury Department's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or avoid Senate confirmation by giving her a recess appointment, according to an administration official.
"If we do it as a recess appointment...she's out a short time later. There may be a way to get her in there now," said an administration official.
Warren, a Harvard law professor who specializes in finance and bankruptcy law and has long backed the new watchdog agency, has some strong boosters, including Obama, who has known her since his days at Harvard Law School. There are also senior aides who like the idea.
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Additional $1 Billion to Stabilize Neighborhoods Hard-Hit by Foreclosure

 In addition to the original funding, the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan awarded an additional $1 billion in funding to all states along with a number of counties and local communities struggling to reverse the effects of the foreclosure crisis. Let's hope that this works for those people who are still struggling.
    . . . June

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Obama Administration Awards Additional $1 Billion to Stabilize Neighborhoods Hard-Hit by Foreclosure
RISMedia: September 13, 2010

U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan awarded an additional $1 billion in funding to all states along with a number of counties and local communities struggling to reverse the effects of the foreclosure crisis. The grants announced today represent a third round of funding through HUD’s Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) and will provide targeted emergency assistance to state and local governments to acquire, redevelop or demolish foreclosed properties.

“These grants will support local efforts to reverse the effects these foreclosed properties have on their surrounding neighborhoods,” said Donovan. “We want to make certain that we target these funds to those places with especially high foreclosure activity so we can help turn the tide in our battle against abandonment and blight. As a direct result of the leadership provided by Senator Chris Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, who played key roles in winning approval for these funds, we will be able to make investments that will reduce blight, bolster neighboring home values, create jobs and produce affordable housing.”

The funding announced today is provided under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. To date, there have been two other rounds of NSP funding: the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 (HERA) provided $3.92 billion and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act) appropriated an additional $2 billion. Like those earlier rounds of NSP grants, these targeted funds will be used to purchase foreclosed homes at a discount and to rehabilitate or redevelop them in order to respond to rising foreclosures and falling home values. Today, 95 cents of every dollar from the first round of NSP funding is obligated—and is in use by communities, buying up and renovating homes, and creating jobs.
State and local governments can use their neighborhood stabilization grants to acquire land and property; to demolish or rehabilitate abandoned properties; and/or to offer downpayment and closing cost assistance to low- to moderate-income home buyers (household incomes do not exceed 120% of area median income). In addition, these grantees can create “land banks” to assemble, temporarily manage, and dispose of vacant land for the purpose of stabilizing neighborhoods and encouraging re-use or redevelopment of urban property. HUD will issue an NSP3 guidance notice in the next few weeks to assist grantees in designing their programs and applying for funds.
Read on . . .

Financial Reform and Transparency in Hedge Fund Management

According to the article below, the Dodd-Frank Act seeks to restore trust and establish a sound regulatory framework for the financial services marketplace. It contains numerous components aimed at more transparency through the disclosure of relevant information and awareness of risk. Lets hope that it works that way.

   . . . June


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Press Release - Financial Reform Legislation and Transparency in Hedge Fund Management:
"September 11, 2010 /24-7PressRelease

With the economy sputtering, seeking to recover from the Great Recession that followed the financial meltdown of 2008, Congress worked for more than a year to develop comprehensive financial reform legislation. The result was the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which President Obama signed on July 21.

Dodd-Frank contains many features intended to require more transparency in financial transactions, so that elaborately packaged products do not create and disguise excessive risk that can harm unwary investors and consumers.

The concerns that led to the legislation reared their head during the 2008 crisis, but they had been building for years. Credit had been too easy to obtain for too many people. Subprime real estate loans, even for people with problematic credit histories or insufficient income, were the most obvious and egregious example. But the problems went beyond subprime loans. Investment banks and financial services firms package such loans and other forms of debt into numerous complex financial instruments that often were devoid of any transparency. And these same financial institutions took on more and more risk through credit default swaps and the use or ever-increasing leverage that placed the future existence of the institutions at great risk. Such risk is what led to the demise of investment banks like Lehman Brothers.

These financial problems infected the economy. Main Street, Wall Street and Washington spent much of 2008 and 2009 performing on-the-fly improvisation, trying to get credit flowing again in the midst of loan defaults, bankruptcies (including Lehman Brothers), rising foreclosures, high unemployment, and a huge government bailout of "too-big-to-fail" financial firms like AIG.

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Yes, Wall Street NEEDS To Change! Is It Pure Greed?

 It's refreshing to hear someone who's NOT blaming President Obama for every little thing. I've gotten so used to hearing this constant criticism that this article clearly jumped out at me. It's not as though Obama made all these decisions in a bubble. He had a team of apparently knowledgeable people helping him to decide what might possibly stop the country from going into total financial failure. Give him a break!
   .  . June


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Wall Street needs to change, not Obama:
PostPartisan   By Katrina vanden Heuvel  |  September 9, 2010; 1:43 PM ET


While no one said that reforming Wall Street would be easy for President Obama, the big-money backlash against his proposals has been surprisingly swift and screechy. In 2008, high finance donated about $40 million to Obama's campaign. As a recent editorial in The Post discusses, though, the financial sector 'is suffering a massive case of buyer's remorse.' There is a perception on Wall Street, The Post surmises, that Professor Obama doesn't have enough real-world business savvy to understand how high finance works, and the newspaper urges the president to cozy up to his one-time benefactors for the good of the nation.


But Wall Street clearly remains far more out of touch than Washington, and after reading some of the words emanating from the Masters of the Universe, one might plausibly wonder if America's lords of finance have spent the last three years living on Saturn.

Stephen Schwarzman, co-founder of the private-equity firm Blackstone Group, recently compared Obama's plans to tax private-equity compensation to Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939. (He later apologized for the "inappropriate analogy," but he’s nonetheless going to have trouble living that one down.) And in his second quarter 2010 letter to investors, distributed on Aug. 27, Daniel S. Loeb, founder of the hedge fund Third Point LLC, wrote, "Perhaps our leaders will awaken to the fact that free market capitalism is the best system to allocate resources and create innovation, growth and jobs.… Perhaps, too, a cloven-hoofed, bristly haired mammal will become airborne and the rosette-like marking of a certain breed of ferocious feline will become altered. In other words, we are not holding our breath." Andrew Ross Sorkin quipped that Loeb’s letter "sounded as if he were preparing to join [Glenn Beck's 'Restoring Honor' rally] in Washington."

Why such hysteria and hyperbole? Shining through the ridiculous rhetoric is pure greed.

Read on . . .

Federal Regulators Have Authority To Declare Wall Street Managers Compensation “Excessive.”

According to the article below, money managers and other financial firms will be required to disclose incentive-based compensation arrangements to federal regulators. The new law mandates that regulations be instituted to ban incentive-based compensation arrangements that encourage inappropriate risks. That seems to be pretty broad and could be open to interpretation. This is such a widely-used practice.

June

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Regulators given broad powers over managers' pay
By Doug Halonen September 5, 2010 6:01 am ET

Investment News: "Money managers are jittery about a provision in the financial-reform law that gives the Securities and Exchange Commission and other federal regulators authority to decide whether their compensation is “excessive.”

The SEC, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and other key federal agencies with financial industry oversight must jointly come up with compensation rules under Section 956 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010.

By April, the new law mandates that regulations be instituted to ban “incentive-based compensation arrangements” that encourage “inappropriate risks” — either because those arrangements result in payment of “excessive compensation, fees or benefits” or could lead to “material financial loss” to the firm.

Money managers and other financial firms also will be required to disclose incentive-based compensation arrangements to federal regulators.


Incentive- or performance-based bonuses are widely used by money managers, according to David Tittsworth, executive director of the Investment Adviser Association. “The bonus structure is in play,” he said.
“It's a big deal,” said Timothy Bartl, senior vice president and general counsel for the Center on Executive Compensation, a lobbying group that opposes mandatory say-on-pay proposals. “It has prohibitions and controls over private-sector compensation.”

The new regulation “could hurt the [money management] industry by increasing costs and uncertainty,” said Alan Johnson, managing director of the executive compensation firm Johnson & Associates Inc.
Some money managers declined to comment on the record, contending that they want to reserve judgment until they see what form the SEC's regulations take.


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Obama Calls For A Growing Thriving Middle Class!

President Obama calls for Americans to recommit to time-honored values, to heal the economy with a healthy stock market, bustling main street and a growing thriving middle class. This as opposed to the past Wall Street practices at the expense of working Americans, who were fighting harder and harder just to stay afloat.…
    . . . June

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Obama's call for help
Abby Phillip - POLITICO.com: 

President Barack Obama, in his weekly address to the nation, kicked off the Labor Day holiday weekend with a call to help rebuild the collapsing American middle class.

“This Labor Day, we should recommit ourselves to our time-honored values and to this fundamental truth: to heal our economy, we need more than a healthy stock market; we need bustling main streets and a growing, thriving middle class,” Obama said.

Obama said that the deep, lingering recession has dealt a hard blow to middle-income earners who had once made the American economy 'the envy of the world.” But he added that, even before the current recession began, “the values of hard work and responsibility that build this country had been given short shrift” in the recent past.

“For a decade, middle class families felt the sting of stagnant incomes and declining economic security,” Obama said. “Wall Street firms turned huge profits by taking, in some cases, reckless risks and cutting corners. All of this came at the expense of working Americans, who were fighting harder and harder just to stay afloat .…Ultimately, the house of cards collapsed.”

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