Janet Tavakoli on the closet Fed. Plus free book today, Feb 21.

The Fed has been engaging in closed door meetings to change rules for banks. It wasn't until Victoria McGrane and Jon Hilsenrath at the Wall Street Journal asked for the results of votes that the Fed posted them on its web site. Since June 2010, the Fed has held only two public meetings on the changes. But just on the topic of derivatives alone it held 14 meetings with JPMorgan Chase, 12 meetings with Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs, and 11 meetings with Bank of America, Barclays, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo.

How effective will the Fed's regulations be after it has taken so much input from banks that vigorously lobbied against the already impaired Dodd-Frank Act?

Without knowing more about the meetings, no one can say for sure, but based on the events since the September 2008 on-going financial crisis, I can take an educated guess. The banks will largely have their way in diffusing effective regulation. After all, they've been remarkably adept at preventing the enforcement of perfectly good laws and regulations already in place before during and after the bailouts.

Read the rest at The Huffington Post

With Trillions On the Table Nobody Plays Fair, and Everyone Plays for Keeps

by Janet Tavakoli
President, Tavakoli Structured Finance

Ms. Tavakoli concludes:

Since 2008, we've seen example after stunning international example of no-strings-attached socialization of losses and privatization of gains. Nothing has changed for the better, because big money interests like it this way, and they are the largest contributors to Congress. The lack of promised campaign finance reform has enabled the ongoing saga of what most of us would call deft theft of public funds.

Endnote:

Free for download today, Tuesday February 21. The New Robber Barons is a Kindle-only e-book compilation of my articles and commentaries from September 2008 to the present. Most of these after 2010 have appeared on The Huffington Post. The advantage of the e-book is that it includes the original reference links including links to some of my original public (non-client) analysis. This is unedited so that readers can see my original thought process and ultimate vindication when the truth was eventually revealed by Congressional investigations. In order to see the pattern, it is arranged chronologically by topic and includes material going back to the September 2008 crisis.Available in the U.S., UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. You must own a kindle, or have installed the Kindle app for PC or Mac, to download it.