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Issues In Focus
The latest in-depth FedFin analysis on breaking strategic challenges and critical policy question.
Financial Services Alert
This analytical service is a battery of alerts and analyses that keep senior management up to the minute on federal developments that affect strategy and the bottom line.
Financial Services Management
Financial Services Management is the analytical resource for senior management. Sharp and concise, it provides detailed discussions of the implications of a wide range of federal actions.
GSE Activity Report
GSE Activity Report is the only analytical service so objective that the GSEs and their harshest critics, as well as the government and investors, all rely on it.
Expert Analysis and Testimony
Federal Financial Analytics managing partner Karen Petrou has on a selective basis agreed to serve as an expert witness in litigation germane to matters such as director-and-officer liability related to regulatory requirements, the manner in which financial institutions are resolved, and the role forward-looking regulatory planning plays in M&A transactions, contractual matters, and related corporate actions.
Engine of Inequality, by Karen Petrou
The first book to reveal how the Federal Reserve holds the key to making us more economically equal, written by an author with unparalleled expertise in the real world of financial policy.
Following the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy placed much greater focus on stabilizing the market than on helping struggling Americans. As a result, the richest Americans got a lot richer while the middle class shrank and economic and wealth inequality skyrocketed. In Engine of Inequality, Karen Petrou offers pragmatic solutions for creating more inclusive monetary policy and equality-enhancing financial regulation as quickly and painlessly as possible.
“Petrou’s book uncovers a hidden engine of our skyrocketing inequality: financial-policy. In an accessible and engaging prose, Petrou takes us through the inner workings of monetary policy at the Fed and financial regulations, how they’ve made inequality worse and how they could instead be retooled to take us to a more equitable future. A novel look at the problem of inequality and bold ideas to help resolve it. A must read.”—Emmanuel Saez, Professor of Economics at the University of California Berkeley and author of The Triumph of Injustice
Read full description and reviews.
Industry Expert
Federal Financial Analytics (FedFin) is a Washington-based financial services-consulting firm that has for decades attracted a high-powered clientele in Washington, on Wall Street, and among global central bankers. Since 1985 FedFin has provided a unique blend of analysis and strategic advice on public policy, regulatory, and legislative issues for industry and governmental clients doing business in the U.S. and abroad.
A proprietary think-tank for its clients, FedFin reviews critical federal and global policy developments in banking, insurance, asset management, and mortgage finance, analyzes them in great depth, and then advises clients on whether what they want can be made to work for them, within the policy environment and for the financial system. It is FedFin’s guiding principle to be an honest broker, and clients depend on the fact that the firm does not offer lobbying or any other services that could compromise its objectivity and independence.
As seen In:
In the News
Mises Institute, Wednesday, September 15, 2021
The Fed Is Bailing Out the Wealthy as Everyone Else Pays the Price By Ryan McMaken The Federal reserve says that inequality is a problem. At the same, the Fed also pretends to have nothing to do with it. Last September, for instance, Jerome Powell bemoaned the "relative stagnation of [...]
The Hill, Wednesday, September 15, 2021
Crypto risk-takers aren't crazy - they're just desperate By Karen Petrou As we've learned the hard way, social media has become a viral force for pandemic-scale political conspiracies. Of course, it's not the media themselves that do this; instead, it's the rage many Americans harbor against governmental institutions profitably enabled [...]
Wall Street Journal, Monday, September 13, 2021
Fed Stock Trading Emboldens Central Bank Critics, Report Says News last week that leaders of the Dallas and Boston Federal Reserve banks were actively trading stocks and other investments while setting monetary policy continues to reverberate. “Once it might have been acceptable for Fed officials to own lots of stocks [...]
Issues in Focus
October 26, 2020: FedFin Issues Brief: Going Green: The Future of U.S. Climate Risk Financial Policy
June 25, 2019: FedFin Policy Paper: Do Credit Unions Truly Advance Economic Equality?
The Vault
FedFin on: GSEs Get a New, If Familiar, Gig
As noted yesterday, Treasury and the FHFA pulled the Trump PSPA's plug, although importantly and widely overlooked is that this is true only when it comes to near-term asset-purchase considerations. Still, with this action atop all the others redefining Fannie and Freddie since Sandra Thompson took over, the GSEs are being reconfigured into agents of Administration policy in concert with being still more critical agencies for housing finance. The full [...]
Karen Petrou: Are Federal Reserve Banks Forever?
After my latest opinion piece appeared in Barron's on Thursday, I was stunned by the virulence with which Barron's readers -- not exactly a bunch of Democratic Socialists -- agreed with me not because of my reasoning, but because they believe the Fed in general and Jay Powell in particular are engaged in a sweeping conspiracy on behalf of the wealthiest global capitalists. The new controversy over Reserve Bank president [...]
FedFin on: Small-Business Lending Disclosures
Turning again to a provision in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection has issued a sweeping proposal to implement small-business and small-farm lending disclosure requirements akin to those long required under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA). Although the law focuses on lender reports to discern different loan-approval rates based on gender or ethnic/racial groups, the notice of proposed rulemaking (NPR) goes farther also to require [...]