Reviews for Biotechnology & Nanotechnology Regulation Under Environmental, Health, and Safety Laws

The average rating for Biotechnology & Nanotechnology Regulation Under Environmental, Health, and Safety Laws based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-02-19 00:00:00 Gregory S Karmel A saucy/misleading title, as the book is more balanced than renegade... and thank goodness. For students of the markets, the authors give a brief history of U.S. banking, explain macro-level derivatives, and why Uncle Sam always bails the banks out. Less data utilized than I'd have liked. Excerpts : --------- "Banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies." - Thomas Jefferson "Like all businesses, banks needed to invent new products that were not yet commoditized and could command high margins. Structured products were the perfect answer… sold largely to sophisticated investors, such as hedge funds and university endowments, and therefore subjected to limited oversight by the SEC. " "According to the head of QuickLoan Funding, a subprime lender, Citigroup provided the funds to borrowers with credit scores below 450. At the time, the national median was about 720." "The discount rate is the rate at which banks may borrow directly from the federal reserve. The federal funds rate is the rate at which banks may borrow money from each other overnight." "In July of 2008, Merrill Lynch sold a portfolio of CDOs with a face value of $36 billion to Lone Star Funds for only $6.7 billion ... and even loaned Lone Star $5 billion to close the deal." "A bank's balance sheet is supposed to record what its assets are worth. A write-down is a reduction in the recorded value of an asset. Only some assets need to be marked to market, meaning their values should be adjusted to current market prices." "In March 2009, under pressure from lawmakers, AIG finally released some details… Goldman Sachs received $12.9 billion from AIG, Merrill Lynch $6.8 billion, Bank of America $5.2 billion, and Citigroup $2.3 billion. This is cash these banks would not have received had AIG gone bankrupt…" "If they're too big to fail, they're too big." - Alan Greenspan "A bank default can cause losses which actually exceed its actual debt… The fact remains that certain financial institutions cast a sufficiently large shadow over the financial system. They cannot be allowed to fail." .

Review # 2 was written on 2014-03-13 00:00:00 charles dye I don't know why I keep reading about the financial crisis of 2008, it just makes me angry. Anyway, this is a one of the several good books I've read on the subject. It has a longer term focus than some, including a section on the history of banking in the United Staes since the founding of the republic, and doesn't give a blow by blow description of what happened in the week that Lehman brothers failed. Rather, it is more about how the banks and the regulatory system got into this fix in the first place. The authors do a better job than most in explaining the jargon behind financial transactions, starting with the basics (such as, what is a bond?). I think I can summarize their conclusions as to how the mess got so big as: 1) to make big money on financial transactions you need to borrow a lot of money short term, which can go badly very quickly when you loan it out long term and your creditors know things are going badly; 2) a lot of new ways of loaning money or taking bets on other people's transactions were invented, because you can't charge high fees on plain vanilla financial products, 3) they found lots of buyers for these complicated products who didn't know what they were getting into or, if they did, figured that nothing bad would ever happen to them, and 4) all this occured in an intellectual climate in which it was believed that minimal government regulation of the financial sector was good for economic growth. Ignorant sub prime home buyers can't take most of the blame because there was a parallel bubble in commercial real estate, fannie mae and freddie mac were mostly not to blame as they couldn't engage in subprime lending, but there certainly was some poltical pressure in both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations to increase the proportion of American households owning their own homes. The authors' advocate a cap on the size of banks as a proportion of gross domestic product as the best way to keep future mistakes from getting out of hand. They also support the idea of a consumer financial services regulatory agency. The book was written while legislation was being considered but before federal financial regulation was modified, so I can't say to what extent their secondary suggestions, such as consumer finance regulation, were in enacted. They seem to be hopeful that eventually effective restraint will be enacted, referring to the 6 year gap between the financial panic of 1907 and the establishment of the federal reserve, and then the roughly 22 years after that in which the federal reserve gained an effective organizational structure. I'm less optimistic.