President Obama’s attempts to shame top bankers on Monday did little to make anyone think lending will suddenly flow freely and financial institutions will quit lobbying to undermine regulatory reform. And the fact that three of the nation’s top bankers literally phoned it in from New York because of early More…
If you’ve got a credit card, you can’t be blamed for thinking that the landmark legislation recently passed by Congress to curb abuses by card issuers would mean the end of things like arbitrary interest rate hikes. That was supposed to be the point, after all, of Congress’ belated More…
Paul Krugman raises a point worth thinking about as you hear more about stress test results for banks, which are expected to be publicly disclosed on Thursday. Why have so many of the results already been leaked — and who is doing the leaking? For example, we’ve known More…
In trying to figure out whether Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s plan to subsidize investors buying toxic assets from banks makes any difference in the lives of people living in blighted communities, I’ve been talking to housing advocates and economists.
Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, More…
More news on the business ethics front: Some Wall Street firms receiving billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout funds are finding creative ways to get around executive compensation limits imposed by the government, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once observed that if you can’t solve a problem, enlarge it. In that spirit, take a look at this press conference in Baghdad Sunday, and watch as U.S. Embassy spokesman Adam Ereli boasts about sending Citibank to Iraq:
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) has some questions this week about how far the Obama administration is going to ensure that Wall Street banks are spending bailout funds as Congress intended.
In a memo (pdf) issued today, Kucinich, who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s domestic More…
Responding to the creeping notion that the government might be forced to swoop in and nationalize some of the country’s flailing banks, Washington’s financial regulators chimed in late Monday to proclaim their confidence in Wall Street’s financial titans to manage the current storm themselves. In a statement, the regulators More…
A year ago, blogger Michael Shedlock pronounced Citigroup insolvent. No one paid much attention then, but Shedlock never wavered.
Now the U.S. government is in talks to significantly expand its ownership of Citi, the Wall Street Journal reports. And Shedlock, who writes the widely read Mish’s Global Economic More…
The New York Times took a stab at getting people who work on Wall Street to defend taking in more than $18 billion in bonuses — roughly the amount that was paid out in 2004, when the economy was just slightly different – and found that most aren’t owning More…
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