Игроки всегда ценят удобный и стабильный доступ к играм. Для этого идеально подходит зеркало Вавады, которое позволяет обходить любые ограничения, обеспечивая доступ ко всем бонусам и слотам.
Regulators, particularly those within the SEC, took a lot of criticism for their inability to prevent the financial crisis in 2008. And rightly so. The complex CDOs and credit default swaps were all poorly regulated and this whole cottage industry that arose to, in essence, gamble on the real estate industry brought the global economy to the brink.
And today that comes from Forbes, which published the well-titled piece “10 Wall Street Expenses That Make The SEC’s Budget Look Pathetic” in response to the ongoing Washington debate over the size of SEC’s budget. (President Obama wants to raise it from the current $1.1 billion to $1.4 billion while House Republicans want to chop $25 million off the current total, according to Forbes.)
It isn’t apples-to-apples, but their list makes you wonder how always-behind-the-times-anyway bureaucrats could ever hope to compete with the savvy titans of the Street. The most glaring comes in looking at the $4 billion JPMorgan maintains for its litigation reserves alone. As Forbes writer Halah Touryalai puts it, “Yes — that means the money JPM is saving so it can fight or settle lawsuits is 4x the size of what the SEC has to regulate the entire securities industry.”
Tragedy hit the highway again today as yet another commercial bus ride turned fatal. Four are dead and 50 have been taken to 11 area hospitals for injuries after a motorcoach headed for New York’s Chinatown from North Carolina ran off the highway and flipped upside down in Virginia on I-95, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch (whose video above shows a helicopter leaving the scene of the accident).
Authorities have cited driver fatigue as the cause of the crash, which involved a 60-person bus owned by Charlotte-based Sky Express Inc., a company with a poor inspection history.
Sky Express Inc., has a troubled inspection history, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s web site.
The company performed worse than 97 percent of all passenger bus companies within the last 12 months and 99.7 percent worse in the last 24 months in the “Driver Fitness” category, FMCSA records show.
Additionally, the firm scored worse than 77.80 percent of all bus companies within the last 12 months and 86.2 percent worse in the last 24 months in the “fatigued driver” category, records shows.
Nothing will bring back the dead, but perhaps this latest tragedy will spur further outcry for better regulation of an industry that has been expanding in recent years without much oversight.
In New York, most people rely on mass transit. And for getting out of town, one of the most popular choices are the motorcoach buses that depart from Manhattan’s Chinatown. These “Chinatown buses” offer riders a cheap ticket out of town to destinations such as Boston, Philadelphia, Washington and various casinos in the area.
But these low-cost tour bus companies have a horrifying track record of safety. On March 12 that fact tragically came to light when a bus returning to Chinatown from the Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut overturned on a Bronx highway, killing 15 people and injuring 20. Just two days later, two people were killed in another accident involving a Chinatown bus returning to New York from Philadelphia. That bus line, Super Luxury Tours, has one of the worst driver safety ratings in the nation, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Transportation. Though Super Luxury Tours may be considered the bad seed of the tour bus industry, many motorcoach companies have a spotty safety record. In fact, the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety reported 34 motorcoach crashes nationwide in 2010 that resulted in 46 deaths and injuries to 363 people.
As Emily goes on to write, in New York, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has called for an audit of all bus operators and, across the Hudson River, Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) has written to U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, urging further legislative action from the federal level.
Thus far, two stalled-in-Congress bills have attempted to impose greater regulations: the Motor Coach Enhanced Safety Act and the Bus Uniform Standards and Enhanced Safety (BUSES) Act. Even after this latest crash, it is not certain that either will advance towards becoming law, at least in part due to prohibitive costs (including the $25 million Department of Transportation estimate it will cost to install seat belts in all buses) and industry opposition, as noted by The Carlson Law Firm PC.
At this point, it is unclear whether either of the two bus safety bills will make it into law. Past attempts to strengthen federal bus safety laws have been largely unsuccessful. The NTSB has been recommending changes to improve bus safety for years, but so far Congress has been unable to implement the vast majority of the recommendations into law.
Regardless of whether Congress is successful in passing tougher bus safety regulations this year, those who have been involved in a bus accident still have legal options available to them. This includes bringing a civil claim against the motor coach company and others for any injuries and other losses they have suffered. Some of the types of compensation that may be available in a bus injury claim include medical expenses, lost wages and other earnings, pain and suffering and other damages.
The first and second rules of Congressional Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Congressional Fight Club. The third rule is that if a new bureau head spends her time in front of a committee hearing being evasive and, allegedly, lying … she has to fight.
Or something like that.
What happened during today’s hearing was that Representative Patrick T. McHenry (R-NC), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, accused Consumer Financial Protection Bureau head Elizabeth Warren of misleading lawmakers in earlier testimony about her role in talks between government authorities and mortgage-servicing companies. McHenry also called Warren out for, according to him, reneging on her agreement to appear before the committee this week.
After an hour in which Ms. Warren repeatedly parried efforts by Mr. McHenry and other Republicans to nail her down with “yes or no” answers to questions concerning her testimony in March and about the bureau’s powers and responsibilities, Mr. McHenry moved to temporarily recess the hearing to allow members to travel to the House floor for a vote on an unrelated matter.
Ms. Warren objected, saying that she had juggled her schedule as the committee repeatedly changed the time of the hearing in recent days and had agreed to be present for only an hour.
A vigorous back-and-forth ensued.
“Congressman, you are causing problems,” Ms. Warren said. “We had an agreement.”
“You’re making this up,” Mr. McHenry replied. “This is not the case.”
The argument, an unraveling of the decorum that usually characterizes discussions among even the most fervent opponents during Congressional hearings, demonstrated the level of frustration that some Republicans apparently feel over the consumer agency, which was established as part of the Dodd-Frank Act that followed the financial and mortgage crisis.
The hearing Tuesday was intended to address the oversight that Congress should require for the agency.
Instead? Nothing got accomplished.
So … it looks like, nearly one year later, everyone is still totally thrilled with Dodd-Frank and that its implementation will continue to go swimmingly for all involved parties.
Simon Johnson is the former IMF chief economist and current professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. And to say he is skeptical about the friendly relationship between government and Wall Street — particularly Goldman Sachs — would be putting it way too lightly.
He seems to be looking around at the industry “overhaul” that has occurred since the banks tanked the economy and wondering why everything is exactly the same as it was before. Very little has changed, he asserts, and he still thinks that at least one major firm remains entirely too big too fail regardless of how much Congress members want to walk around patting themselves on the back for passing Dodd-Frank last summer.
At the Institute for New Economic Thinking conference in Bretton Woods, he asked the following. (His transcribed comments here come from the video below.)
“Who in the room thinks that if Goldman Sachs were to hit a rock, a hypothetical rock — I’m not saying they have, I’m not saying they will. If they were to hit a rock today, Saturday, who here thinks they’ll be allowed to fail like Lehman Brothers did unimpeded by any kind of government bailout starting Monday morning? Can Goldman Sachs fail?”
After this, he pauses and looks around the room from his podium. You can’t see the crowd on the video but it becomes apparent that no one spoke up or raised their hand.
“I’ve asked this question around the country [and] only one person has ever raised his hand. It was in New York. He had a big short position in Goldman stock. That’s New York. But seriously, it can’t happen. Goldman Sachs is a $900 billion bank, total balance sheet. You might want to say it’s too big to fail. You might want to use the language of [Bank of England governor] Mervyn King and say it’s ‘too important to fail.’ You wouldn’t allow it to fail. I wouldn’t allow it to fail if it was my decision. You wouldn’t either. It’s too scary today given the nature of the global economy. And from that scariness comes power — comes an enormous amount of power.”
He then asks the audience what happened to the plans to reform this? Why is “too big too fail” still allowed to persist? Why is, as he claims, “it going the other way … too big to fail firms have gotten bigger”?
In his explanation is a lot of truth and straight talk about what he believes has been a failure to reform. Watch the video below in its entirety to hear all his insight. It’s 10 minutes long but you can make the time. (via The Economist)
In somewhat related news, New York magazine has put together a multi-part feature on “The Mind of Wall Street.” At it’s core, the piece asks if, when it comes to post-financial crisis reform, Wall Street won then why is it so worried.
Combined, both go a long way to explaining the current climate in the financial sector.
