Bailout

As the Senate idles awaiting a procedural vote on unemployment legislation — a vote that’s held up activity on all other pending legislation and nominations — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) this morning offered a solution that might speed things up: “Maybe [Republicans] needed another ACORN amendment,” Reid said, with no lack of sarcasm. [...]

It’s no mystery that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is the ultimate Wall Street insider. But it seems that more and more Democrats are losing their patience with what they perceive as his protectionism of the finance industry at the expense of consumers and taxpayers. The latest to weigh in is Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who [...]

“Mr. Secretary, I’m not a man that fears this administration or you,” Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.) told Geithner. “But I do fear the accumulation of power exercised by someone in the future that can be extraordinary.”

Bush administration officials have been under fire for effectively forcing a merger last December between Bank of America and Merrill Lynch without informing BoA shareholders of the financial dire straights Merrill was in at the time.
But yesterday the Obama administration was pulled more deeply into the scandal as well, after newly unveiled BoA documents suggested [...]

Now that commentator and PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley has severed his ties to Wells Fargo & Co., what about the bank itself? As Smiley noted in his decision to cut business ties with Wells, the bank is facing several lawsuits charging that it engaged in illegal discriminatory lending practices by allegedly selling high-cost [...]

Mitt Romney at the Values Voter Summit this morning:
When government is trying to take over health care, buying car companies, bailing out banks, and giving half the White House staff the title of czar – we have every good reason to be alarmed and to speak our mind!
Romney at the Conservative Political Action Conference in [...]

Appearing on Wall Street today, President Obama accused some of the nation’s financial institutions of “misreading” the economy’s nascent recovery, and urged Congress to pass strict new banking regulations to prevent the industry’s “reckless behavior” from spurring another economic collapse.
We will not go back to the days of reckless behavior and unchecked excess that [...]

Even as some of Congress’ recently enacted credit card reforms go into effect today, a New York Times editorial reminds Washington that the banks are still cheating customers with overdraft fees charged to debit card users. These fees, which average $27 a pop, are slapped on consumers when purchases exceed account balances, regardless [...]

One watchdog says the strange giving patterns just shows “the financial industry isn’t sure what’s happening to itself.”

I know it’s not helpful to have knee-jerk reactions to Wall Street pay, given that compensation is often more complicated than portrayed, but there’s no subtlety here: Bailed-out financial firms are on track to pay their employees as much, or more, than they were rewarded with during the pre-crisis days, The Washington Post reports.
Here are [...]