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Senate aides inched closer Friday to combining separate bills that would establish oversight of the vast market for derivatives, an effort central to the ongoing push to revamp the nation’s financial regulations.
Derivatives are invented securities such as futures contracts, collateralized debt obligations, and credit-default swaps that are related to real assets or events but have no inherent value of their own.
Arthur Wilmarth, law professor at George Washington University, believes the OCC, along with the Office of Thrift Supervision, had a lot to do with why subprime loans became as big a problem as it did, by taking the power to supervise banks away from the states.
Confirming what most analysts knew, both before and after 2007, a Senate panel investigating the causes of the nation’s financial crisis on Thursday unveiled evidence that credit-ratings agencies knowingly gave inflated ratings to complex deals backed by shaky U.S. mortgages in exchange for lucrative fees.