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Now that President Obama has signed legislation for The Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009, a new commission, the 'Financial Markets Commission' has a what should be and could be an amazing mandate, including subpoena powers, to investigate all the causes of the collapse. FUNCTIONS OF THE COMMISSION.--The functions of the Commission are-- (1) to examine the causes of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States, specifically the role of-- (A) fraud and abuse in the financial sector, including fraud and abuse towards consumers in the mortgage sector; (B) Federal and State financial regulators, including the extent to which they enforced, or failed to enforce statutory, regulatory, or supervisory requirements; (C) the global imbalance of savings, international capital flows, and fiscal imbalances of various governments; (D) monetary policy and the availability and terms of credit; (E) accounting practices, including, mark-to-market and fair value rules, and treatment of off-balance sheet vehicles; (F) tax treatment of financial products and investments; (G) capital requirements and regulations on leverage and liquidity, including the capital structures of regulated and non-regulated financial entities; (H) credit rating agencies in the financial system, including, reliance on credit ratings by financial institutions and Federal financial regulators, the use of credit ratings in financial regulation, and the use of credit ratings in the securitization markets; (I) lending practices and securitization, including the originate-to-distribute model for extending credit and transferring risk; (J) affiliations between insured depository institutions and securities, insurance, and other types of nonbanking companies; (K) the concept that certain institutions are ''too-big-to-fail'' and its impact on market expectations; (L) corporate governance, including the impact of company conversions from partnerships to corporations; (M) compensation structures; (N) changes in compensation for employees of financial companies, as compared to compensation for others with similar skill sets in the labor market; (O) the legal and regulatory structure of the United States housing market; (P) derivatives and unregulated financial products and practices, including credit default swaps; (Q) short-selling; (R) financial institution reliance on numerical models, including risk models and credit ratings; (S) the legal and regulatory structure governing financial institutions, including the extent to which the structure creates the opportunity for financial institutions to engage in regulatory arbitrage; (T) the legal and regulatory structure governing investor and mortgagor protection; (U) financial institutions and government-sponsored enterprises; and (V) the quality of due diligence undertaken by financial institutions; (2) to examine the causes of the
collapse of each major financial institution that failed
(including institutions that were acquired to prevent
their failure) or was likely to have failed if not for
the receipt of exceptional Government assistance from the
Secretary of the Treasury during the period beginning in
August 2007 through April 2009; ...
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