Category - Budgeting

Today the House Financial Services Committee will hear testimony from the SEC inspector general on the Madoff scandal. It promises to be the beginning of what Rep. Paul Kanjorski (chairman of the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance and Government-Sponsored Enterprises) is calling “the most substantial rewrite of laws governing U.S. financial markets since the Great Depression.” Wall Street could not have escaped congressional scrutiny after the year that we’ve had even if Madoff had never happened, but the failure of regulators to protect the public from his massive fraud has drawn fresh attention to the shortcomings of existing

Bloomberg.com has toted up all the Federal commitments made to date to stabilize the markets and the figure, if correct, is staggering: $7.76 trillion.

Yesterday, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hauled in a gaggle of hedge fund managers to grill them about, among other things, why they should receive such favorable tax treatment. If I were a congressman, the question I’d have liked to have asked this crowd is, “Why is it so often the case that when hedge funds fail, they don’t merely fail, they implode, like dying stars?” This failure mode seems especially inappropriate for an investment class that’s often touted as a way to make money in both good times and bad.

I’ve written several posts on the asset protection limits available to consumers who have invested in a variety of financial assets. With all the changes and adjustments that have taken place in the last few months in the financial landscape, I thought it might be helpful to provide a single article summarizing the insurance /protections currently available to investors.