Maybe jingoism doesn't sell

Nike’s online sales spiked by 31 percent from the Sunday before Labor Day through the next Tuesday, eclipsing the 17 percent growth Nike saw during the same period in 2017. This followed Nike’s announcement of an ad campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick, the former NFL quarterback who was allegedly blacklisted by the league because he protested police violence against African-Americans.

This spike in sales defied the stock market’s expectations of the likely impact of Nike’s campaign — Nike’s stock dropped sharply when trading opened Tuesday morning.

MI6 planning Syrian chemical attack?

Fresh off a sitdown with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, Virginia state senator Richard Black turned up on Arab TV last week making an extraordinary claim about one of the US’ closest allies.

Mr Black said Britain’s MI6 intelligence service was planning a chemical weapons attack on the Syrian people, which it would then blame on Mr Assad.

“Around four weeks ago, we knew that British intelligence was working towards a chemical attack in order to blame the Syrian government, to hold Syria responsible,” Mr Black said on Al Mayadeen, an Arab news channel based in Beirut.

Repeating mistakes #1

Freedom is nowhere near the size of behemoths like Citigroup or Bank of America; yet last year it originated more mortgages than either of them, some $51.1 billion, according to industry research group Inside Mortgage Finance. It is now the 11th-largest mortgage lender in the U.S., up from No. 78 in 2012.
...Postcrisis regulations curb bank and nonbank lenders alike from making the “liar loans” that wiped out many lenders and forced a wave of foreclosures during the crisis. What worries some industry participants is that little has changed about nonbank lenders’ structure.

Their capital levels aren’t as heavily regulated as banks, and they don’t have deposits or other substantive business lines. Instead they usually take short-term loans from banks to fund their lending. If the housing market sours, banks could cut off their funding—which doomed some nonbanks in the last crisis. In that scenario, first-time buyers or borrowers with little savings would be the first to get locked out of the mortgage market.

Repeating mistakes #2

The 2008 financial crisis cost every American $70,000, according to the San Francisco Federal Reserve. An entire generation’s lifetime earnings will be lower because of it. Trillions of dollars in wealth were destroyed.

And yet, we seemingly learned nothing from it — which means it could happen again, and sooner than you think.
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For instance, on a bipartisan basis in May, Congress approved a measure that raises the level at which banks are subject to stiffer regulation, from $50 billion in assets to $250 billion. It was presented by members of Congress as a way to provide relief to community banks, but it actually allows for less attention on major regional players such as Sun Trust or BB&T, and will encourage other banks to grow up to the $250 billion barrier. Lehman Brothers, remember, was not the biggest of the big when its bankruptcy occurred, so allowing the definition of “big” to creep ever upward is dangerous.

A second deregulation bill passed the House in July with a big bipartisan majority. It would do further damage by exempting some non-banks — such as insurance companies or money managers — from assessments meant to determine whether a firm can survive a national economic calamity without being bailed out. This is a key change with potentially catastrophic consequences: just because companies aren’t banks doesn’t mean they can’t take down the financial system. AIG, for example, was an insurance company that was so entangled with Wall Street that it received a bailout in 2008, despite not being a bank. The Senate could likely muster up a healthy number of votes for this bill too, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has pledged to vote on it before the midterm elections.

Then there’s the Trump administration’s undermining of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau...Trump then took office, and appointed Mick Mulvaney to run the bureau, who doesn’t believe it should exist and is acting like it. He’s pulled back from investigations, ended promising cases and even changed the bureau’s name. He seems to want to prevent the agency from doing its job at all, though it’s the only regulator solely tasked with the welfare of consumers rather than that of financial institutions.

The same thing is occurring at the Office of Financial Research, a team within the Treasury Department charged with collecting and standardizing the sort of data regulators didn’t have in the buildup to the 2008 crisis, which could have helped them spot the mess in mortgage markets sooner. Trump’s appointee to head the office used to be on the staff of Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, who wanted the office abolished altogether. Like Mulvaney, there’s little reason to think he would work to fulfill the office’s mission.

It's the corruption, stupid

Fielded in the days after the indictment of Michael Cohen and jury decision in the Paul Manafort trial, three in ten voters (30 percent) – including about one-third of independent voters and Democratic voters, and one-fourth of Republican voters – say corruption in Washington, D.C. is the most important topic for 2018 candidates to talk about during their campaigns. This ranks among the top topics, which also includes health care (27 percent) and economy and jobs (25 percent). About one-fifth of voters say various other topics including immigration (19 percent), the investigation of whether Russian meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election (19 percent), and gun policy (18 percent) are the most important issues for the 2018 campaigns. Similar shares also say it is most important for candidates to talk about President Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court (17 percent) and tax cuts and tax reform (15 percent).”