Bankrupt lender CIT Group announced today that it hired former Merrill Lynch Chairman and CEO John Thain to take over the top slot at the company and, hopefully, lead it out of bankruptcy. A bit of background on CIT Group: The company accepted $2.3 billion from the TARP More…
Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story’s New York Times piece yesterday was a thorough explanation of Goldman Sachs’ machinations that contributed to the collapse of AIG and the government’s perceived need to jump in and pay for everything without negotiating prices.
But unless you’re well-versed in the modern minutiae More…
The co-CEO of the Pacific Investment Management Company, which currently employs former TARP head Neel Kashkari — whose job it was to rescue the U.S. economy — is no longer as in love with the Treasury as he once was. Today, and despite the deepening concerns about a More…
Before James O’Keefe recorded his undercover ACORN videos he cut this Yes Men-ish video for Right.org, in which his “Taxpayers Clearing House,” mimicking the Publisher’s Clearing House, conducted a series of stunts to attack the bailouts. They drove up to the homes of ordinary people, seemingly awarding them enormous More…
The latest political clamor over AIG, poised to combust next Wednesday at a House hearing on backdoor payments to banks that made risky deals with the company, centers on the Federal Reserve’s effort to conceal details of those payments. But senior officials, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, have so far More…
The tax on the nation’s bailed-out banks, proposed by President Obama last week, has won the support of congressional liberals, and even some conservative commentators have jumped on board. But don’t try to convince Peter Morici. The University of Maryland business professor (and prominent voice on More…
Rep. Edolphus Towns, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will subpoena the New York Federal Reserve for documents related to the AIG bailout, the New York Democrat announced today.
The New York Fed has been under close scrutiny since last week, when it was revealed More…
One year and one day after the Bush administration first offered to rescue GMAC, the Obama White House has announced a $3.8 billion bailout for the struggling auto- and mortgage-loan giant. From the Treasury Department’s statement:
Due to a variety of factors, including that
Ten years ago, Congress dismantled the decades-old Glass-Steagall Act, breaking down the firewalls between commercial banks and securities houses, and helping Wall Street firms grow into the too-big-to-fail institutions that exist now. There’s been a great deal of debate about the extent to which the death More…
A revealing moment from Robert Draper’s entertaining writeup of the GOP gubernatorial primary in Texas comes when Gov. Rick Perry (R-Texas) makes an offhand attack on TARP.
“What would have been your remedy, then?” I asked.
He shrugged. “What was our remedy then is still the remedy,” he said.
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