The Continued Swampification of America

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Silver
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The Continued Swampification of America

Post by Silver »

Seriously, there are no more excuses. Trump has clearly shown his obeisance to the Gadiantons with this latest move. If you don't get it after this nomination...

1. The Federal Reserve is unconstitutional and immoral. It has, with the willing help of both Democrats and Republicans, made debt slaves of us all.
2. The Bush Administration was full of evil RINO's including ol' Skull & Bones "W" himself.
3. The Treasury Department which abdicated its Constitutional duty, is particularly full of traitors.
4. Eccles. The Federal Reserve's building in Washington DC is named after the traitor Marriner Eccles, Latter Day Saint.

Let's see who Trump nominated for the laughable Federal Reserve job of bank regulator. Why it's Quarles, Randal Quarles, who is opposed to imposing stricter capital requirements on banks, and, guess what, the banks love him. So while Trump should be shutting down the Fed Res, instead another swamp creature from previous administrations is getting another tax-paid job at the most evil central bank on earth. And he's a Yale graduate along with being married to an Eccles. You guys tired of winning yet?

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/1 ... cop-240377

Trump makes pick for top bank cop
By VICTORIA GUIDA and BEN WHITE 07/10/2017 06:28 PM EDT
President Donald Trump ended months of speculation by announcing Monday his plan to nominate former Treasury official Randal Quarles as the Federal Reserve's regulatory chief, according to people familiar with the decision.

The position will give Quarles a portfolio with an immense impact on the nation's banks.

Trump's pick marks the first formal nomination ever for the position of Fed vice chair of supervision, which was created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. Although former Fed Gov. Daniel Tarullo informally filled the job for most of the interim, Quarles will play a trailblazing role in carving out the authority and responsibility of the title.

Quarles, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration, has argued against imposing higher capital standards on banks. That policy stance will be enthusiastically welcomed by banks, which have grumbled about the layers of capital requirements put in place since the financial crisis.

His nomination will also solidify Trump's bank regulatory team. The president has tapped former OneWest CEO Joseph Otting as comptroller of the currency and longtime House aide Jim Clinger as chairman of the FDIC.

If confirmed, Quarles will be mandated to testify before Congress twice a year on regulatory matters.

Quarles is a managing partner at equity investment firm the Cynosure Group. A graduate of Yale Law School, he served as Treasury undersecretary for domestic finance from 2005 to 2006, and as assistant Treasury secretary for international affairs for three years before that. He serves on the board of FINRA, Wall Street's self-regulator.

As a member of the Fed board, Quarles will also have a direct hand in setting monetary policy at a time when the central bank is in the process of removing its extraordinary support for the U.S. economy, put in place during the financial crisis.

In a 2016 op-ed with Lawrence Goodman, who is head of the Center for Financial Stability, Quarles called for a prescriptive monetary policy rule, such as the Taylor rule, which projects an appropriate path for policy based on an equation developed by Stanford University economist John Taylor. The two men said this would “reduce the incentive for big banks and even smaller institutions to take dangerous risks.”

That position puts Quarles at odds with the rest of the Fed board members, each of whom has argued that policy rules are useful but too constrictive to be binding.

Quarles is married to Hope Eccles, a relative of former Fed Chair Marriner Eccles, the namesake of the Fed’s main office building.

Silver
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Re: The Continued Swampification of America

Post by Silver »

You've been betrayed. More swamp creatures in the ever-rising swamp around you. I hope you can tread water for a long time.

https://www.thestreet.com/story/1422105 ... ntary.html

Quarles' Nomination Good News for Banks: Commentary
Tom Bemis Jul 10, 2017 9:53 PM EDT

President Trump has nominated former Treasury official Randal Quarles as Fed vice chair of supervision, in charge of regulating big banks.

U.S. banking giants such as Citigroup (C) , Bank of America (BAC) and Wells Fargo (WFC) are surely pleased by the decision since the former Bush administration treasury official has publicly opined against "arbitrarily taking an ax to big banks and irreparably damaging the economy."

In addition, Quarles' more hawkish stance on interest rates and his role on the FOMC will also be welcome news to banks, which have been surfing higher on the Fed's recent interest rake hikes.

That position on rates cuts both ways of course. Quarles cautioned in 2016 that historically low interest rates helped fuel "a rise in speculative positions across a wide range of asset classes."

Of course, since Trump claims credit for the surge in stock prices since the election, one might expect Quarles to back away from any immediate efforts to deflate investing bubbles.

Quarles will likely pop to the top of prospective candidate lists in the event Trump decides not to re-nominate Fed Chair Janet Yellen when her term is completed at the end of January.

Silver
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Re: The Continued Swampification of America

Post by Silver »

Hey kiddos, have you been wondering what President Kushner has been up to lately? Well, wonder no more. The Golden Boy is back in the news, and just like the great big investment he got from George Soros, that's right, George Soros, yes, that George Soros, our hero, President Kushner, has been out looking for money because that's what the privileged do (like the Clinton Foundation). What? You didn't think the privileged elite, sons of criminals, like President Kushner actually worked for his money, did you? No way, man. They get us serfs to do the work and they go on living their sparkling lifestyles and simply smirk at us when we sing the national anthem.

The sheeple have no idea how badly the Trump administration is deceiving them.

http://theantimedia.org/jared-kushner-5 ... ion-qatar/

Jared Kushner ‘Sought $500 Million From Qatar for Skyscraper Bailout’
July 11, 2017 at 4:24 am
Written by Middle East Eye

(MEE) — Jared Kushner, the son-in-law to US President Donald Trump and a senior White House adviser, sought a $500m investment from Qatar for a New York skyscraper shortly before the diplomatic crisis between Qatar and a host of other countries, according to an Intercept article on Monday.

The account raises suspicions that Trump’s foreign policy is related to the family’s business interests.

Citing unidentified sources that reportedly had knowledge of the proposed bailout, the Intercept reported that Kushner tried to shore up funding from Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani (HBJ) after the skyscraper’s value plummeted from the real estate crisis in 2008. Kushner had bought the building in 2007 – when he was 26 – for $500m out of his family’s pocket and $1.3bn in borrowed money.

However, the real estate crisis forced Kushner to sell off a sizeable chunk of their office space in the building as part of a financial package; but in order to pay back those who originally borrowed money, he must have $1.3bn by early next year. According to a New York Magazine report, if Kushner “can’t find some new scheme for refinancing and redeveloping the property by then, [he] will have cost his family half a billion dollars”.

After the election, investors appeared to be willing to bail out Kushner’s skyscraper fiasco.

HBJ reportedly agreed to invest $500m in the severely debt-ridden property as long as Kushner was able to raise the rest of the money, which he could do when he became a senior White House adviser, according to the Intercept article.

A Chinese company with ties to members of the country’s ruling party was also willing to shore up $400m in March, but had decided to back out in March over a “conflict of interest” that consisted of “a company with ties to the Chinese government going into [big] business with the family of a senior adviser to the American one”.

When the Chinese company exited, so did HBJ.

Months later in June, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain cut off all air, land and sea links to Qatar. Trump sided with the four-nation coalition, saying that the tiny petro-chemical nation funded terrorism.

The Intercept reported that Kushner played a key role in the White House’s hardline stance against Qatar, but it did not establish a link whether Kushner’s role had anything to do with the failed skyscraper bailout.

Silver
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Re: The Continued Swampification of America

Post by Silver »

Oh, President Kushner, say it isn't so...

http://theweek.com/articles/711143/jare ... al-scandal

But as bad as that all is, a still worse scandal surrounds another attendee of that June 2016 meeting: President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. Donald Jr., for all his bumbling and incriminating behavior, is still a private citizen with no direct influence over public policy. Kushner, however, is a high-powered official in the White House, and he has consistently withheld information about his ties to an adversarial government.

Kushner's name has already popped up several times in the context of the Russia investigation. In May it was revealed that Kushner and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had met with Russia's ambassador to the U.S. with the hope of setting up some ill-conceived backchannel communication between Moscow and the Trump presidential transition team. Kushner also met during the transition with the CEO of a bank with close ties to the Kremlin. Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller is reportedly digging into Kushner's financial ties to Russia, and Democrats in Congress are demanding to know why Kushner did not disclose his meetings with Russian officials when applying for his security clearance.

And now we learn that Kushner went with Trump Jr. and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to meet with a Russian lawyer who was looking to offload some opposition research on Hillary Clinton. In the previous two instances in which Kushner was caught failing to disclose his meetings with Russians, the administration argued (implausibly) that he was simply performing routine diplomatic work as a member of the presidential transition. Kushner's lawyers insisted (again, implausibly) that his failure to disclose these meetings on his security clearance applications was merely an oversight. As the Times reported over the weekend, government officials only recently became aware of the June 2016 meeting after Kushner filed updated versions of his security forms.

The problem with all this is that Kushner, a senior White House official with access to top secret information and the ear of the president, certainly appears to be badly compromised. It's suspicious enough that the president's son-in-law just happened to "forget" all these meetings he had with Russian officials, but his presence at the June 2016 meeting places him in direct proximity to a foreign power's covert effort to influence the presidential campaign.

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Re: The Continued Swampification of America

Post by Silver »

https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation ... story.html

Trump ran against family political dynasties, and then built his own

By Astead W. Herndon GLOBE STAFF JULY 11, 2017
WASHINGTON — President Trump trained his rhetoric against the Bush and Clinton dynasties to win the White House, but a fresh spate of controversies highlights how an extraordinary reliance on his own family members has surpassed the sort of political blood ties he denounced on the stump.

His son Donald Trump Jr., who helps run the Trump real estate empire, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a key White House adviser, have emerged as focal points of investigations into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.

His daughter Ivanka, who also has a White House office, drew fire for standing in for Trump and taking his seat at a conference table with other heads of state at the G-20 conference in Germany on Saturday.

Their entanglements and controversies have been magnified both by their inexperience in government roles and by their continued, heavy influence on Trump’s political operations.

On Monday, senators called for Donald Trump Jr. to testify before lawmakers regarding a New York Times report that revealed his June 2016 meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer who promised damaging information about his father’s campaign opponent, Hillary Clinton. Kushner also was present at that meeting. Both have retained lawyers as questions swirl about their contacts with Russians.

Trump’s enemies are having a field day, gleefully painting him as hypocritical for failing to “drain the swamp’’ of Washington influence as he promised during the campaign. Instead, they argue, he has elevated family members at the expense of public-service experience and adherence to strict ethical standards. He also has blurred the lines between his family real estate empire and White House roles by failing to completely disentangle his financial interests.

“Make no mistake: This is not normal for representative democracies,” said Leah McElrath, a former Washington communications strategist who now writes for a liberal website, ShareBlue. “This kind of nepotism and familial surrogacy is completely normal in authoritarian regimes.”

According to Richard Painter, an ethics lawyer under Republican President George W. Bush, Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a foreign official in hopes of getting damaging information about someone vying to be the next president of the United States could be considered criminal behavior.

“We do not get our opposition research from spies; we do not collaborate with Russian spies, unless we want to be accused of treason,” Painter said Sunday on MSNBC. “This is unacceptable. This borders on treason, if it is not itself treason.”

Last week, the director of the Office of Governmental Ethics resigned from the White House in frustration, saying he had never seen an administration disregard standards to guard against nepotism, conflicts of interest, and professional ethics in such a fashion.

The former director, Walter Schaub, is set to join the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington nonprofit office that advocates for higher ethical standards for lawmakers.

Larry Noble, general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, said in an interview that Trump is “undermining the credibility of the office” because the American people don’t know if he’s acting in the best interests of “the country, or his businesses and family.”

Simply put, Noble said, “he’s stress-testing our democracy.”

White House officials have tried to frame Trump’s active family as a positive for the country. As is often the case with this White House, officials blame the news media for unfairly treating Trump’s adult children.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday that Americans should be proud to have Ivanka Trump representing the United States, and that “if she didn’t have the last name that she has I think she would be constantly celebrated.”

On the issue of Kushner and Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with the Russian lawyer, Huckabee Sanders tried to downplay its seriousness. The only thing “inappropriate about the meeting was the people who leaked information about it,” Sanders said.

Over the weekend, the US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, defended Ivanka Trump in a cable news interview, saying she “sees herself as part of a public servant family,” and thus her presence at the G-20 summit was acceptable.

In February, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway was admonished by Schaub’s ethics office after she encouraged Americans to buy Ivanka Trump’s clothing during a television appearance.

Recent reports in The New York Times pried the lid off family entanglements related to the campaign. According to the Times, a meeting between Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, and a Russian lawyer during the presidential campaign occurred after the Russian official promised damaging information on Hillary Clinton.

Initially, Trump Jr. denied the reports, but he soon contradicted himself, admitting that he was offered damaging information about Clinton before he attended the meeting, along with Kushner and Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager at the time.

On Monday, news reports said that Trump Jr. had hired an outside lawyer to represent him during the ongoing Russia probes.

“Obviously I’m the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting to hear info about an opponent,” Trump Jr. tweeted Monday to defend himself. “Went nowhere but had to listen.”

And the Times reported Monday night that, before arranging the meeting he believed would offer compromising information about Clinton, Trump Jr. was informed in an e-mail that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy.

The new revelations were the latest examples of how the widening inquiry into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russian officials was beginning to engulf more of Trump’s inner circle — inside and outside of the White House.

For Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, it is the second meeting with Russian officials which is drawing extreme scrutiny. Earlier in the year, reports revealed that Kushner had failed to disclose a transition meeting with former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. After that meeting, Kislyak told Moscow-based Russians that Kushner was trying to set up a secret, secure back channel so Trump officials could communicate with Russia without the knowledge of US intelligence agencies.

Historians said Trump is hardly the first the president or presidential candidate to rely on family members, but there are some unique elements in this administration.

President John F. Kennedy appointed his brother Robert to be attorney general — but Robert Kennedy was an accomplished lawyer who was confirmed by the Senate. Bill Clinton leaned on his wife, Hillary Clinton, to help frame and craft policy on issues such as children’s health insurance.

In Trump’s case, the advisers are not a spouse or a sibling, but adult children who have spent their lives as their father’s underlings in various family business enterprises.

Julian E. Zelizer, a presidential historian and professor at Princeton University, said the Trump family dynamic is unprecedented in the American executive branch, considering their vast personal wealth and Trump’s chaotic governing style.

On the one hand, Kushner and Ivanka Trump are merely listed as advisers, and Donald Trump Jr. does not even work in the White House. However, because Trump is known to highly value personal loyalty, the family seems to have an outsized role in influencing the president’s decision-making, Zelizer said.

“The looseness by which he runs his White House, just like he run his campaign, might give more room to his family to be influential beyond their formal roles,” Zelizer said. “There’s more chaos and more fluidity in how decisions are made, which are different than the other examples,” he said.

Zelizer pointed to Kushner’s role as Middle East peace envoy as evidence the Trump family holds more formal responsibilities than does a typical White House adviser.

“It was very clear throughout the campaign that this would be a family-business presidency. It shouldn’t be a surprise,” Zelizer said. “But nepotism when combined with the family businesses can be a problem that, even if people voted for it, doesn’t mean it’s right.”

Silver
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Re: The Continued Swampification of America

Post by Silver »

Other seasoned voices agree with me. Randal Quarles even gets a mention in this article. Randal Quarles, the guy I mentioned in the original post of this thread, even gets a mention. Very much worth the read. Click on the link to see the graphs...if you're not too busy watching something on TEEVEE.

Trump is no longer the president. He's the Swamp Master. And a murderer.

https://dailyreckoning.com/donald-trump ... al-bubble/

The overwhelming source of what ails America economically is found in the Eccles Building. During the past three decades the Federal Reserve has fostered destructive financial mutations on Wall Street and Main Street.

Bubble Finance policies have fueled an egregious financial engineering by the C-suites of corporate America. This bubble has skyrocketed to the tune of $15 trillion of stock buybacks, debt-fueled mergers deals and buyouts of the last decade.

The Fed fostered a borrowing binge in the household sector after the 1980s. It eventually resulted in Peak Debt and $15 trillion in debilitating debts on the homes, cars, incomes and futures of what used to be middle class America.

Liability Level 1

It also led politicians down the path of free lunch fiscal policy. By monetizing $4.2 trillion of Treasury and GSE debt during the last three decades, the Fed numbed the US economy from effects of crowding out and rising interest rates that would have come from soaring government deficits. This left the public sector impaled on Peak Debt.

Ever since Alan Greenspan launched Bubble Finance in the fall of 1987, public debt outstanding has increased by nearly 9 times. Measured against national output, the Federal debt ratio has risen from 47% to 106% of GDP.

Federal Debt Total 2

These actions have stripped-mined balance sheets and cash flow from main street businesses. The Fed has stifled economic growth while delivering multi-trillion windfalls into the hands of a few thousand speculators on Wall Street.

These rippling waves of financial mutation are why the US economy is visibly failing and why vast numbers of citizens in Flyover America voted for Donald Trump for president.

Ironically, even as he stumbled to his victory on November 8, Trump barely recognized that the force behind all the economic failure that he railed against was the nation’s rogue central bank.

Only when it occurred to him that Janet Yellen was doing everything possible to insure Clinton’s victory did he let loose an attack on the Fed. In his famous warning, he leveled that America was threatened by a big, fat, ugly bubble.

Unfortunately, there was never even a hint of policy content behind this campaign statement. It said nothing of a coherent plan to liberate the American economy from the nation’s central bank.

When Wall Street launched a phony Trump Reflation trade during the wee hours of election night, the Donald forgot all about the great bubble. In fact, he quickly embraced it as a sign that investors were enthusiastically embracing Trump-O-Nomics.

No new arrival in the Oval Office was ever more mistaken. The gambling halls of Wall Street were a clear and present danger to his presidency, but Trump had only a small window of time for a counter-strategy.

He needed to quickly puncture the bubble, not embrace it; and his first, second and third actions on the economic policy front should have been to clean house at the Fed. He should have named names and insured that the current Fed incumbents get the blame when the inflated stock and bond markets finally implode.

All the tools were there. The Fed had three vacancies out of seven seats on the Board, and he could have cleared more by demanding the resignation of Janet Yellen and Stanley Fischer from day one.


Instead, the Donald got off-track from the get-go with aiming his efforts against immigrants and refugees; nonsense about the Mexican border; and the hideously bloated Pentagon budget.

While all of that was bad, the Donald’s fatal error was delegating economic policy to Wall Street errand boys. Trump handed economic power to Steve Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross and Goldman Sachs’ next-in-line gatekeeper to Washington, Gary Cohn.

These characters are a slap-in-the-face to the populations in the rust belts which elected him.

At the end of the day, the lines of demarcation are crystal clear. The Fed is Wall Street’s angel and Main Street’s enemy.

The Donald has ended up handing the keys to economic policy to a cabal of Wall Street operators, who have wasted six months doing nothing on the central banking file.

Mnuchin has even toyed publicly with the idea that Yellen might be reappointed because she has done a “good job”.

You cannot talk about reappointing Janet Yellen and making the American economy great again in the same sentence.

To do so is to voluntarily take ownership of the very big, fat ugly bubble that has brought so much hardship to Flyover America.

Yesterday’s announcement of an appointment to one of the Fed vacancies leaves nothing to the imagination.

After finally announcing a candidate for a job which will determine whether American capitalism can even survive, the Trump White House picked the absolute worst candidate available. Trump named Randall Quarles, a veritable creature of the Wall Street/Washington establishment, as his nominee for vice chairman for supervision at the Federal Reserve.

Randy Quarles is the former Under Secretary of the Treasury in the George W. Bush Administration. Before founding Cynosure, Mr. Quarles was a longtime partner of The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest private equity firms.


In addition to his record as a successful investor, he has long experience at the highest levels of the international financial architecture, having represented the U.S. for many years in the G7, G20, and Financial Stability Forum, and having served the U.S. as Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund, Executive Director of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Quarles spent many years working as a partner at the Wall Street law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell, where he was the co-head of the firm’s Financial Institutions Group and advised on transactions that included a number of the largest financial sector mergers ever completed.

Do not take comfort from the fact that Quarles mimics the Hoover Institution’s version of economics. The notion that it’s fine to intrude deeply into the mainspring of capitalism in the financial markets and distort all financial asset prices, but it should be done based on formulaic rules rather than “data-dependent” policy discretion.

Quarles has professed an affinity for the Taylor Rule, a Rube Goldberg policy contraption invented by one of Milton Friedman’s disciples, and named for himself.

It should be clear to anybody not drinking the Fed’s kool-aid, that it is impossible to accurately measure the Fed’s goals for unemployment and inflation on which the massive $4.4 trillion balance sheet is premised.

How else do you account for the rampant gains in the cost of living plaguing Flyover America that the BLS neglects to even measure? This measure has caused those members of the Fed working in the Eccles Building to pursue even higher levels of inflation.

During the first 14 years of this decade the Fed claimed price levels rose by only 31.7% when everything households in Flyover America were buying to survive had inflated by multiples – in some case 100-300%.

How can there be “full-employment” at 4.4% unemployment claimed by the BLS and the Fed’s monetary central planners, when there are 103 million adults without jobs?

Inflation Shortfall 3

What Randal Quarles brings to the table is a vision of anti-market monetary central planning that is far worse than what has already brought American capitalism to its knees.

The Donald now owns the Bubble and has left his Presidency and the American economy squarely in harms’ way.

There is no doubt that they bubble blind and have no understanding of the rampant speculation and driven risk-taking their policies have unleashed in the casino. Even Barron’s last cover story made it clear that robo-machines, ETF’s and other forms of passive “investing,” have set the markets up for a thundering crash.

Needless to say, the Fed is only now beginning to apprehend the train-wreck that lies dead ahead. Thus, the June FOMC minutes were grasping for something dimly worrisome:

According to the minutes, some FOMC members acknowledged that “equity prices were high when judged against standard valuation measures.” Some are even “concerned that subdued market volatility, coupled with a low equity premium, could lead to a buildup of risks to financial stability.”

Do ya think?

Does the Donald have a clue?

Regards,

David Stockman
POSTED
JULY 11, 2017

Silver
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Posts: 5247

Re: The Continued Swampification of America

Post by Silver »

So, again, I'm telling you that there can no longer be any doubt. Trump = The Swamp = The Gadiantons

His MAGA claim was merely meant to fool enough of the masses to vote him in. Now will you please prepare for the collapse of our economy? I've shared the warnings of Brandon Smith here multiple times. The elites will crash the US economy so the conservatives can be blamed for the ensuing troubles.

Silver
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Posts: 5247

Re: The Continued Swampification of America

Post by Silver »

More dirt on Quarles, the latest swamp monster to rear its head. Another fox guarding the henhouse. And when you see who is praising him, you know the little people will continue to get stomped on by the elites. Thanks, Marmalade!

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... tchdog-job

Revolving Door Spins Ex-Carlyle Deal-Maker Into Key Fed Role
By Jesse Hamilton
July 12, 2017, 10:09 AM CDT

*Quarles helped private-equity firm buy banks after 2008 crisis
*Dodd-Frank critic was a Treasury official in runup to meltdown

For Randal Quarles, the 2008 financial crisis presented an opportunity. Then a Carlyle Group managing director, he hunted through the carnage of the banking industry in search of deals and pushed regulators for more leeway.

Now, the lawyer who once sought to topple regulatory obstacles is set to become Wall Street’s chief watchdog, President Donald Trump’s pick as the Federal Reserve’s vice chairman for supervision. To the job widely regarded as the biggest in bank regulation, Quarles brings a view that regulation is more likely to be a problem than a solution.


Randal QuarlesPhotographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
After two stints both at Treasury and at law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, where he worked on mergers including the one that created JPMorgan Chase & Co., Quarles joined Carlyle, focusing on grabbing stakes in financial companies. He helped the private-equity firm go on a buying spree after the industry hit bottom, making deals for pieces of several smaller regional banks.

In the vice chairman role, Quarles would be the public face of the Fed’s regulation of Wall Street. He would testify twice a year before Congress, updating lawmakers on the central bank’s work. Still, until Trump can replace her in February, Fed Chair Janet Yellen will have the last say on regulatory matters.

‘Inappropriate Pressures’

Having spent his career studying the banking business and regulations, Quarles declared himself unimpressed by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, the U.S. response to the financial crisis, calling it a “failure of ambition” and a “concession to inappropriate pressures,” during a Bloomberg Television interview in 2015.

“In some ways, it was not aggressive enough,” he said. “You could have responded to those pressures with a more aggressive restructuring of the financial regulatory structure of the country without some of the particular provisions that really just aren’t well-designed and were included for political rather than financial regulatory reasons.”

As a Fed vice chairman, Quarles would be in a position to lead a charge against measures including the Volcker Rule, which he has cited as an example of Dodd-Frank’s failings. Trump administration officials have similarly criticized that measure, which people familiar with the matter have said is under review by the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a panel of regulators led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Several agencies, including the Fed, would have to participate in a re-write.

‘Positive Sign’

Trump’s Monday announcement of the planned nomination -- a move that has been floated for months -- is “a positive sign for bigger banks as Quarles should support deregulation,” said Jaret Seiberg, an analyst with Cowen & Co., in a Tuesday note to clients.

“I can’t imagine supporting somebody who seems to be so ideologically aligned with Wall Street, but let him convince us otherwise,” Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the top Democrat on the Banking Committee, said in a statement. “I think he is going to have a tough fight.”

Another key Democrat on the committee, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, has already promised to oppose Quarles, calling him “a dangerous choice for this critical job.”

“In his time in government he demonstrated little appreciation for the risks posed by giant financial institutions,” Warren said in a statement. “His confirmation would weaken Wall Street oversight -- and that’s something no American can afford.”

First Supervisor

Quarles’ arrival at the Fed -- pending Senate confirmation -- would install the Trump administration’s first pick on the seven-member board of governors, where Yellen will continue to control the big-picture agenda until her term expires in February. His four-year term as vice chairman would make him the first person to hold the title, established by Dodd-Frank to increase the profile of banking supervision at the central bank, though he may be the opposite of what Democratic sponsors of the law had in mind.

As a longtime Wall Street lawyer, he was used to pushing the boundaries of regulations. During a 2005 confirmation hearing for a Treasury job, he told lawmakers that he “helped some of the world’s premier financial institutions think through their approach to an increasingly integrated financial system.”

In 2008, he and another managing director at Carlyle wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal saying the private-equity industry stood ready to flood cash into banks if they could be given leeway to invest without triggering the additional demands of having a controlling interest. “The Federal Reserve and other banking regulators can help remove obstacles to this important pool of capital,” they wrote.

He also might provide some fireworks in another part of the Fed: its role as the arbiter of U.S. monetary policy. He would be among the 12 voting members of the Federal Open Market Committee, and there are reasons to believe that Quarles would support following a formulaic monetary policy rule.

Evidence for that lies mainly in a 2015 interview, in which Quarles said that “if you’re going to be transparent in an activity like the Fed’s, you have to be much more rule-based in what you’re doing.”

Bank Stake

Quarles, 59, left Carlyle and in 2014 co-founded Salt Lake City-based Cynosure Group. The private-equity firm manages money for wealthy families, including that of his wife, Hope Eccles. Quarles brought with him from Carlyle a stake in Brand Group Holdings Inc., a Georgia bank, which heralded the Eccles family as a major investor in a December statement.

Two years before the near-collapse of the U.S. financial system -- before he left Treasury for Carlyle -- he delivered remarks sympathizing with the “unnecessary regulatory burdens” on financial firms, saying it was important to keep an eye on “eliminating outdated regulations and unnecessary requirements.”

Glass-Steagall Act

During his first stint at Treasury, in the early 1990s, Quarles led a study on reforming the financial industry that eventually contributed to ending Glass-Steagall Act separation of commercial banks and investment firms. Trump campaigned on a call for reinstating the Depression-era law, but his lieutenants more recently have made clear that they have no intention of breaking up the big banks that formed in its wake.

A spokeswoman at Cynosure didn’t respond to an email seeking comment from Quarles.

“The nomination of Randy Quarles for vice-chair of supervision represents a step back into the past, not a step forward,” Marcus Stanley, policy director for Americans for Financial Reform, said in a statement. “Quarles was part of the regulatory team at the Bush Treasury Department that missed the oncoming 2008 financial crisis and failed to take any effective action to stop that crisis.”

Quarles has made it clear he favors a less intrusive approach.

“The government should not be a player in the financial sector,” Quarles said on Bloomberg Television. “It should be a referee.”

Charles Plosser, former president of the Philadelphia Fed, called Quarles a “terrific choice” in an interview Tuesday on Bloomberg Television.

“Randy will bring a refreshing view and not fall in line with the group-think that sometimes comes out of Washington,” Plosser said.

Silver
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Re: The Continued Swampification of America

Post by Silver »

The FBI, that bastion of truth, justice and the American way (not) may get a new head soon. What do you know about Christopher Wray? Did you know his father was a swamp monster at a big law firm in NYC? Did you know that Christopher graduated from Yale? Are you beginning to see the elitist pattern here? Did you know that Christopher Wray represented Governor Chris Christie during the Bridgegate scandal? Birds of a feather flock together?

Did you vote for more swamp monsters?

Silver
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 5247

Re: The Continued Swampification of America

Post by Silver »

https://www.breakingviews.com/considere ... fed-chair/

One-eyed man
12 July 2017 By Gina Chon
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Only in Trumpland can Gary Cohn be considered a suitable Federal Reserve chairman. The former Goldman Sachs president and current White House adviser has been tipped as top contender to replace Janet Yellen, Politico reported. Though not a trained economist, Cohn’s years in finance put him ahead of other Donald Trump cabinet picks notably lacking relevant résumés. But a Wall Street trader’s temperament makes a bad match for the staid central-bank job.

The registered New York Democrat didn’t have a government background when he became director of the National Economic Council. Still, he had honed his finance skills during more than 25 years at Goldman and he quickly hired White House staff with complementary experience. His operation contrasted with those of cabinet members like Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who struggled to answer basic questions about school curriculums in her confirmation hearing.

Choosing Cohn as head of the central bank would be an unconventional pick. Over the last 40 years, Fed chairs have been economists and have also served at least two four-year terms. Yellen will have only served one if Trump does not renominate her. The last one-term, non-economist Fed chair was William Miller, who had been CEO of Textron before President Jimmy Carter tapped him. Amid high inflation, his policies tanked the U.S. dollar and he lasted just over a year.

Cohn spent much of his time at Goldman as a trader. He joined its J. Aron commodities unit and became head of the divisions for fixed income, equities and global securities before becoming president. Goldman is known as the most alpha of the investment banks and the hard-charging job fit Cohn’s personality.

Running the central bank is a more sedate affair. The staff consists of number crunchers with doctorate degrees in economics who pore over various models to analyze growth and employment. Press conferences after meetings by the interest-rate-setting committee are carefully scripted. Yellen, like her forebears, chooses her words carefully knowing any hint of surprise can rattle markets.

Her predecessor, Ben Bernanke, learned that in 2013 when he said the central bank would no longer be purchasing bonds, causing U.S. Treasury yields to surge in what became known as the “taper tantrum.” Blunt talker Cohn may find such restrictions suffocating. Markets will prefer a more boring choice

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