A Welcome Victory over Sarbanes-Oxley's PCAOB
Nearly five years ago, CEI and accountant Brad Beckstead began to discuss mounting a constitutional challenge to Sarbanes-Oxley’s Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB). The PCAOB’s rules...
View ArticleElena Kagan's War on Small Business
Now that Congress has passed -- thanks to the peeling off of a bare minimum of Senate Republicans -- and President Obama has signed a financial regulatory bill with a massive scope and untold costs,...
View ArticleKagan and the Agency-Exhaustion Doctrine: A Response to Media Matters
Well, who’da thunk it? George W. Bush’s Justice Department is now considered a citadel of wisdom by the legal eagles at Media Matters for America. Yesterday, I outlined in NRO how Elena Kagan took the...
View ArticleThe Firemen Next Time
‘So the question is, do you want to live in the kind of society in which this happens?” So wrote New York Times columnist Paul Krugman of the Tennessee fire whose flames have consumed the punditocracy...
View ArticleMemo to Col. West: Beware of Glass-Steagall
When freshman congressman and former lieutenant colonel Allen West was chosen to give the coveted keynote speech to close the Conservative Political Action Conference, he told National Journal that he...
View ArticleObama's Funny Auto-Jobs Math
‘The auto industry has added 113,000 jobs over the past two years.” So proclaimed President Obama in his speech Friday at the Chrysler-Fiat plant in Toledo, Ohio, his tone triumphal despite the...
View ArticleBachmann and the '20,000 Millionaires' Myth
“Michele Bachmann would knock 20,000 millionaires off tax rolls.” So reads the glaring headline on a blog post by Howard Gleckman of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center that this Saturday was No. 2...
View ArticleConstitutional Nonsense on Debt
Lo and behold! As we celebrated this Fourth of July amid the debt-ceiling fight, the netroots and progressive pundits suddenly discovered the Constitution’s relevance in fiscal matters. It doesn’t seem...
View ArticlePut a Ceiling on Overregulation
After months of saying it wanted a “clean” hike in borrowing authority, the Obama administration now proclaims it wants to do something “big” in a debt-ceiling package just as its self-imposed deadline...
View ArticleDebt Ceiling and Reg Relief: Looking Back to 1996
Earlier this week in NRO, Wayne Crews and I made the case for including regulatory relief in a debt ceiling package. Further research shows there is a precedent for including reg relief measures in a...
View ArticleDodd-Frank’s Fannie Trap
One year ago today, President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Despite the “Wall Street” moniker, the tentacles of Dodd-Frank’s 2,315 pages and hundreds of...
View ArticleThe Wisdom of the Debt Ceiling
Even though I often disagree with his conclusions, I’ve long been a fan of New Yorker correspondent James Surowiecki. In his articles and his book, The Wisdom of Crowds, Surowiecki has come up with...
View ArticleEuro Crisis No Excuse for Dismal U.S. Growth
Yesterday, the U.S. stock market tanked in large part due to the eurozone crisis. Yet today, U.S. employment numbers, as Bob Stein noted earlier in the Corner, defied expectations and offered glimmers...
View ArticleThe Benefits of a Downgrade
The AAA rating played a key role in the mortgage bubble. And of late, it was playing a similarly dangerous role in a bubble in United States Treasury securities. Standard & Poor’s downgrade Friday...
View ArticleWhy Your Bank Is Charging More Fees
There are many observations that can be made about President Obama’s remark Monday to ABC News that businesses “don’t have some inherent right just to get a certain amount of profit if your customers...
View ArticleSneaking in Fannie-Freddie Subsidies for the 1 Percent
It has been said that if anything unites the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, it is a hatred of corporate welfare and bailouts that benefit the very wealthy.To the extent that this is true, both...
View ArticleWhat About Fannie Mae Millionaires?
‘They are#...#not interested in asking millionaires and billionaires to pay a half a penny on the dollar for the sake of the future of our children and communities.”That was the reaction of Sen. Bob...
View ArticleRepublicans for Sarbanes-Oxley
If there is one issue that may somewhat unite the GOP presidential field and the Obama administration, it’s disdain for a nearly ten-year-old law signed by George W. Bush. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of...
View ArticleThe Problems with the STOCK Act
It’s April 2012. You are a conscientious congressional staffer who still takes seriously the need to be a steward of taxpayers’ money. (Yes, we know for a fact there are more than a few of these folks...
View ArticleThe STOCK Act and the SEC
I have long admired Stephen Bainbridge’s writings on corporate governance and securities regulation. Usually, he casts a skeptical eye on the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as the “good...
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