While You Were Working - August 18 - SmartBrief

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While You Were Working – August 18

Bannon gets the boot, the personnel policing Wall Street, Jeffrey Gundlach gets feisty, and why Jesse Eisinger is smirking.

3 min read

Finance

Steve Bannon

Steve H.B. Bannon gets the boot. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Bannon got the boot

The stock market climbed (and floor traders cheered) on the news that Steve H.B. Bannon was sent packing by President Trump. For the record, I am giving The Mooch half the credit for Bannon’s ouster. And since his targets were Bannon and Reince Priebus, Mooch’s final batting average for his 10 days in the White House climbs to .750.

And even if one doesn’t care about the “globalists” who run the stock exchange, it has to be at least a wee bit demoralizing to see an entire economy cheer when you get canned. Ouch.

Personnel is policy … and so is policing

Like a certain senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts likes to say, personnel is policy. This analysis of the financial regulatory landscape under the Trump administration is one of the better recaps I have seen lately. And the funny thing about most of those individuals is that they believe in the fallacy of the regulatory pendulum.

“We’ve definitely reached the apex of the regulatory pendulum,” says Michael F Silva, a partner at DLA Piper who spent 21 years at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York before entering the private sector. “There’s no doubt it is now swinging the other way.”

I have never understood why people think modern regulation has to act like a pendulum. There was a meltdown. New rules were put in place to prevent another meltdown. Those rules are working. The economy is stable. Banks are reporting record earnings. Can someone explain to why there is a need for the pendulum to swing the other way?

If you were a police chief and there was an area of your city that was riddled with crime, you would probably increase patrols in that area. If crime went down in teh area after a couple weeks of increased patrols, would you suddenly stop the patrols?

Jeffrey Gundlach isn’t paid to be nice

So it appears Jeffey Gundlach of DoubleLine Capital isn’t playing nice on Twitter. Some are comparing his aggressive voice on the social media black hole to that of one @realDonaldJTrump.

I am not too sure it really matters if Gundlach is nice or not. He makes his money by being right. The rest is just for entertainment.

Jesse Eisinger smirked

Because apparently no one did anything illegal during the whole London Whale debacle. Nope, nothing to see here. Everything was on the up and up.

Barclays deployed Big Brother to monitor its bankers

Barclays has installed sensors at the desks of some of its bankers to keep track of how often they are … you know … at their desk. The bank says it isn’t trying to snoop, but is instead trying to gauge just how much office space it needs to conduct its business.

The funny thing is that just because a banker is at their desk, that doesn’t mean they are … you know … working.

Wells Fargo is still too big to manage ethically

At this point, do the details even matter? If you see the name Wells Fargo in a headline, you can assume the bank did something wrong. The latest.

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