Mr. President, I rise today because I am deeply concerned that just over one year since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a failure that helped send us to the brink of depression, Wall Street is essentially unchanged.
Congress and the SEC have not enacted any reforms. And the American people remain at risk of another financial debacle - not just because the same practices that led to the crisis 14 months ago are continuing, but from new practices which are leading to new problems and new systemic risks.
Mr. President, last year, the financial world almost came to an end. And yet most of Wall Street then believed that no government review or additional regulation was necessary - right up until the moment government had to step in to save it.
We had been assured that the system was sound. We were assured that a host of checks and balances were in place and would suffice. We were assured that:
So as the chart so straightforwardly conveys: Banks were involved in high-risk, high-return investments that were unregulated.
Then - crash. The housing bubble burst and a disaster of truly monumental proportions struck.
Americans lost $20 trillion in housing and equity value during the ensuing financial meltdown. The economy lurched into freefall and Gross Domestic Product shrunk by a staggering percentage not seen since the 1950s.
What happened next? The American taxpayer, the deep pocket and lender of last resort, had to ride to the rescue. Mr. President, we can barely even count the trillions of dollars of taxpayer money that have gone into bailing out the banks, bailing out AIG, bailing out a number of financial institutions.
And that's not including the billions of taxpayer dollars we have had to spend to stimulate the economy. Mr. President, we must never let this happen again.
Yet here we are. One year later. With no immediate crisis at hand, we are falling back into complacency. The credit default swap market remains unregulated. The credit rating agencies have not yet been reformed. And the banks are back to their old habits: paying out billions of dollars in bonuses for employees who are still engaged in high-risk, high-reward practices.
What is the great lesson we should have learned from the Financial Debacle of 2008? When markets develop rapidly and change dramatically, when they are not regulated, and when they are not fully transparent - it can lead to financial disaster. That is what happened in the credit default swap market.
Mr. President, we must never let this happen again.
And so I look forward to working with my colleagues to regulate the derivatives markets - to ensure that credit default swaps are traded on an exchange or at least cleared through a central clearinghouse with appropriate safeguards enforced. And to enact meaningful financial regulatory reforms.
Mr. President, at the same time, we need to be looking carefully to see if these three deadly ingredients - rapid technological development, lack of transparency, and a lack of regulation - are appearing again in other markets.
Mr. President, there is no question in my mind that in today's stock markets, those three ingredients do exist. Due to rapid technological advances in computerized trading, the stock markets have changed dramatically in recent years. They have become so highly fragmented that they are opaque - beyond the scope of effective surveillance. And our regulators have failed to keep pace.
The facts speak for themselves. We've gone from an era dominated by a duopoly of the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq to a highly fragmented market of more than 60 trading centers. Dark pools, which allow confidential trading away from the public eye, have flourished, growing from 1.5 percent to 12 percent of market trades in under five years.
Competition for orders is intense and increasingly problematic. Flash orders, liquidity rebates, direct access granted to hedge funds by the exchanges, dark pools, indications of interest, and payment for order flow are each a consequence of these 60 centers all competing for market share.
Moreover, in just a few short years, high frequency trading - which feeds everywhere on small price differences in the many fragmented trading venues - has skyrocketed from 30 to 70 percent of the daily volume.
Indeed, the chief executive of one of the country's biggest block trading dark pools was quoted two weeks ago as saying that the amount of money devoted to high-frequency trading could "quintuple between this year and next."
Mr. President, we have no effective regulation in these markets.
Last week, Rick Ketchum, the Chairman & CEO of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority - the self-regulatory body governing broker-dealers - gave a very thoughtful and candid speech, which I applaud. In it, Mr. Ketchum admitted that we have inadequate regulatory market surveillance.
His candor was refreshing but also ominous: "There is much more to be done in the areas of front-running, manipulation, abusive short selling, and just having a better understanding of who is moving the markets and why."
Mr. Ketchum went on to say:
[T]here are impediments to regulatory effectiveness that are not terribly well understood and potentially damaging to the integrity of the markets...The decline of the primary market concept, where there was a single price discovery market whose on-site regulator saw 90-plus percent of the trading activity, has obviously become a reality. In its place are now two or three or maybe four regulators all looking at an incomplete picture of the market and knowing full well that this fractured approach does not work.
[I]f there are traders taking positions and then generating momentum through high frequency trading that would benefit those positions, that could be manipulation, which would concern us. If there was momentum trading designed - or that actually exacerbated intra-day volatility - that might concern us because it could cause investors to get a worse price. And the other item I mentioned was if there were liquidity detection strategies that enabled high-frequency traders to front-run pension funds and mutual funds that would also concern us.
We need more information on the entities that move markets - the high frequency traders and hedge funds that are not registered. Right now, we are looking through a translucent veil, and only seeing the registered firms, and that gives us an incomplete - if not inaccurate - picture of the markets.
Market surveillance should be consolidated across all trading venues to eliminate the information gaps and coordination problems that make surveillance across all the markets virtually impossible today.Let me repeat: market surveillance across all the markets is "virtually impossible today." And none of the industry witnesses disagreed with Senator Schumer. That is why the SEC must not let months go by without taking meaningful action. We need the Commission to report now on what it should be doing sooner to discover and stop any such high frequency manipulation. Mr. President, where is the sense of urgency? Mr. President, we must also act urgently because high frequency trading poses a systemic risk. Both industry experts and SEC Commissioners have recognized this threat. One industry expert has warned about high-frequency malfunctions:
The next Long Term Capital meltdown would happen in a five-minute time period. ... At 1,000 shares per order and an average price of $20 per share, $2.4 billion of improper trades could be executed in [a] short time frame.This is a real problem, Mr. President. We have unregulated entities - hedge funds - using high frequency trading programs interacting directly with the exchanges. As Chairman Reed said at last week's hearing, nothing requires that these people even be located within the United States. Known as "sponsored access," hedge funds use the name of a broker-dealer to gain direct trading access to the exchange - but do not have to comply with any of the broker-dealer rules or risk checks. SEC Commissioner Elisse Walter has recognized this threat:
[Sponsored access] presents a variety of unique risks and concerns, particularly when trading firms have unfiltered access to the markets. These risks could affect several market participants and potentially threaten the stability of the markets.
Let me repeat that: "These risks could affect several market participants and potentially threaten the stability of the markets."
Even those on Wall Street responsible for overseeing their firms' high frequency programs are not up to speed on the risks involved, according to a recent study conducted by 7city Learning. In a survey of quantitative analysts, who design and implement high frequency trading algorithms, two-thirds asserted their supervisors "do not understand the work they do."
And though quants and risk managers played a central role exacerbating last year's financial crisis, 86% of those surveyed indicated their supervisors' "level of understanding of the job of a quant is the same or worse than it was a year ago," and 70% said the same about their institutions as a whole.
I agree with market expert and 7city Director Paul Wilmott, who said: "These numbers are alarming. They indicate that even with the events of the past year, financial institutions are still not taking the importance of financial education seriously."
Mr. President, where is the sense of urgency?
Time is of the essence.
We must act now.
Charles Gasparino: Goldman Sachs Doing "God's Work"?
The only thing worse than Goldman Sachs amassing billions in bonus money for its executives, based on various government subsidies and bailout measures, is listening to it try to explain it all away.
Les Leopold: New York Times Blames Workers for Unemployment?
A column in the Business section was about how the American worker is overpaid. They claim that if workers don't take cuts, these "overpaid" working stiffs will be the cause of another Great Depression.
Ellen Brown: Goldman's Profits Come from Our Pockets: Why We Need a Tobin Tax
While Wall Street's welfare queens have been busy collecting generous government handouts, the 50 states have been left to fend for themselves.
Adding a tax (bail-outs are paid for by taxes) merely adds a greater burden on the people.
Let the banks or corporations go broke on their own. The smart ones will move to China
or India anyways because the labor is cheaper. I love this story about Adolf Hitler.
One day, he called Germany's top corporations into his office for a meeting and demanded they
double employment - in the middle of the Great Depression.
"How can we afford that," they cried.
Hitler smiled (a wicked one of course) and said, "Simple we will cut wages in half."
The devil is in the details. So cut out the details and get to the main point - people need jobs
and if we shut the Mexican border, we wouldn't have to worry about illegal immigrants stealing
jobs from Americans (who will have to work if welfare was eliminated or cut).
bs FDR proved it.
Get over it.
Maybe the key to progress is to force a legitimizing task the size of Texas upon the financial industry.
Step 0 in that program is to point out that the fairy tale of self-policing markets (and all other versions of the ideological brotherhood of the efficient market hypothesis) is in a shape which could be reasonably compared with that of a dead horse.
Step 1 is to explain to the major players that their lobbying clout won't save them from themselves. At least not in the long run, in which they will be dead.
Step 2 is to explain to those same major players that nobody believes that they don't already know that. As a result, they are free to stop lying about it.
Step 3 is where the fun starts: it's where the major players must offer their best shot at renewing the old myth of self-policing. Because it is on the basis of the flaws of that best shot that the new laws and regulations need to be written.
Step 4 da capo.
And they all lived happily ever after.
Unregulated economies are rumors becoming panics.
But you are far to generous with Derivatives, CDS particularly.
We have outlawed all derivatives and main street and real economy have always done better.
Nobody would buy CDS investment insurance if the they had to pay for proper insurance reserves.
Just get rid of CDS. You CANNOT insure investment. Hedging fails big.
Trying to make investing safe, has catastrophic consequences.
I would like to add that "high frequency" traders are a significant part of our economic problem.
Day trading started off as a fad, and has grown wild in popularity to the point that it is manipulating markets and causing wild unexplained fluctuations in market values.
Investment needs to be based on long-term investment for a healthy economy. This high frequency, computerized trading offers no real value to our economy, and only benefits the few. I would support putting an end to the practice, or taxing it so heavily that it becomes a dis-incentive.
Technology will continuously outpace reform and regulation. Stated differently, it is easier to game any system than it is to put in place rules that prevent such gaming.
Therefore, the only effective way to regulate a system is to step out of it and impose rules that cannot be altered by the players. Having economists devise regulatory schemes is doomed to failure because they are incapable of stepping outside.
What is needed is a panel of outside experts with one or two sensible economists as non-voting advisers.