The chairman/CEO split issue is a sideshow. No one has considered the troubling implications of a large, misguided bet that happened to pay off the year before the London Whale losses.

The return to profitability of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is not a reason to preserve them as part of a future housing finance system.

Receiving Wide Coverage ... Deriving Pleasure: Too many price quotes will increase trading costs and reduce liquidity. That is the curious (if not spurious) story megabanks successfully stuck to in lobbying financial regulators to water down a key provision of the Dodd-Frank Act aimed at governing derivatives trading. The result was a 4-to-1 vote by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Thursday in favor of reducing the number of price quotes buyers must seek before conducting…

Loan performance data show the entire case against GSE underwriting standards, and their role in the financial crisis, is based on social stereotyping, smoke and mirrors, and little else.

Analyze data to tailor offers and draft sales pitches that customers, particularly those visiting branches, will have a hard time refusing.

Receiving Wide Coverage ... Aw Mom, JPMorgan Again? Yes, kids, but today's meatloaf is spicy. Broadridge, the firm counting JPMorgan shareholder votes on the resolution to sever the CEO and chairman jobs, has stopped providing running tallies to the investors sponsoring the proposal, the Times reports. Broadridge says it did so at the behest of SIFMA, the Wall Street trade group, whose members are the firm's clients. SIFMA told the Times that "one of its working…

The common-sense steps taken in the bill will help even the playing field between community banks and big financial firms.

The banking industry must create sustainable mortgage products that will work for responsible families of modest means. We also need a proactive homeownership policy from the federal government.

The heart of the issue is not who holds what titles, but whether a company’s governance processes are functioning as they should.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...

Sick of JPMorgan Yet? The Times' "Deal Professor," Steven Davidoff, calls the fight over the upcoming JPMorgan shareholder vote "silly." Though severing the chairman and CEO roles has improved governance at many companies, he writes, "not all companies are alike," and he finds the benefits of the independent-chair model for a large, complex bank dubious. "No study to my knowledge has ever found that companies that do such a split are better…

A modified version of Ed DeMarco’s securities-based model for housing finance reform could promote an active market for risk-sharing arrangements and further reduce systemic risk by distributing credit risk broadly.

The central bank is too big, too leveraged, extremely short-funded and a frequent creator through its interest rate and money-printing actions of gigantic systemic risk.

The bill would replace the misleading risk-based capital system with a straightforward way to determine the true health of an institution, in addition to providing incentives for the largest banks to downsize.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...

More JPMeeting Previews: JPMorgan's annual meeting is a week from today, and the curtain-raisers keep coming. "Shareholders are taking a close look at financial relationships between some J.P. Morgan Chase board members and the company they oversee," according to the Journal. For example, the bank underwrote a bond issue, provided a line of credit and made charitable contributions to the American Museum of Natural History, run by Ellen Futter, a JPMorgan director.…

It’s important that models for stress-testing be capable of representing the nuances of the questions they are asked to answer. Insights would be lost if models are kept too simple.