Just in time for your holiday listening pleasure, here are two songs making their way around the blogosphere to celebrate the season and mark another year of falling home prices and an expanding commercial real estate bust.
First, via Mortgage Insider, here’s “The Twelve Months of Default,” which More…
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner got an earful last week from House Democrats wary of the White House proposal to pay for government rescues of Wall Street firms by taxing healthy competitors only after Washington steps in. The critics want companies to pre-pay instead into a kind of sitting More…
Testifying before House lawmakers yesterday, Sheila Bair, head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, endorsed much of the controversial proposal to grant the White House new powers to take over Wall Street investment firms when their failure threatens the larger financial system.
A timely, orderly resolution
The JumpStart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy, a national nonprofit advocacy group that aims to improve the financial management skills of America’s youth, draws lots of attention for its surveys measuring how much kids really understand money. Last spring, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke More…
The Washington Post, this morning:
Senior administration officials are considering the creation of a single agency to regulate the banking industry, replacing a patchwork of agencies that failed to prevent banks from falling into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, sources said.
Bloomberg, today:
House Financial Services Committee
The outrage over AIG bonuses is dying down, but it is only being replaced by a blame game. According to critics, President Obama went too far in his populist pronouncements against banks, and his administration, led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, is bungling the rescue effort. Banking executives have More…
Did you ever do something that, with the benefit of hindsight, seemed really, really stupid and you wondered what exactly you were thinking at the time?
Imagine how the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation must feel these days. The same agency that now says it needs to borrow $500 billion in More…
It’s no secret that some powerful Democrats are none too pleased that the Bush administration has refused to use the $700 billion Wall Street rescue to help struggling homeowners facing foreclosure. Yesterday, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) floated a possible remedy, suggesting that any Detroit More…
President-elect Barack Obama is confronting a cascading economic crisis, which seems to worsen by the day, not the week. As venerable banking houses collapse, once-mighty industries teeter on the brink of oblivion and unemployment mounts, the air thickens with recollections of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and comparisons between More…
The plan for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to streamline mortgage modifications for troubled homeowners has already come in for some harsh criticism. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chairwoman Sheila Bair, in particular, has been outspoken in her opposition.
That’s important, because Bair is the leading proponent of massive More…
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