financial mess

Officially introducing his economic team Monday, President-elect Barack Obama reiterated his call to help Detroit’s automakers survive the miserable economy — but emphasized that the companies should be prepared to make some concessions in return.
“We can’t allow the auto industry simply to vanish,” he said. “[But] we can’t just write a blank check … Taxpayers [...]

Remember when the subprime crisis first broke out last fall, and the Bush administration’s first response was to suggest that people read the fine print on their mortgages and take financial literacy courses?
It would not be such a bad idea for Wall Street to do the same now.

The relief that greeted the Treasury Dept.’s $700-billion plan to bail out the financial markets is turning in an new direction this week, as people begin to study the details.
Plenty of prominent voices – Paul Krugman among them – are concluding it’s a big blank check for Wall Street that does nothing to help [...]

The stock market leaped giddily in late Thursday’s trading on rumors that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. is thinking of “a government-led plan that would bail out the banks in a Resolution Trust Corp.-type scenario,” in the words of the Wall Street Journal’s “MarketBeat” blog.
Yearnings for an “RTC-type solution” that could hold failing mortgages over [...]

Sen. John McCain’s top economic adviser is busy tracking the financial crisis, but he took time on Tuesday to offer a novel argument for McCain’s grasp of the financial markets. Politico:
Holtz-Eakin: McCain helped create BlackBerry
Asked what work John McCain did as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the [...]

Now that the government has nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it should step in and modify the mortgage loans of troubled borrowers on a massive scale, consumer advocates say.
Housing Wire reports that advocates are pushing the two mortgage giants to follow the lead of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which is attempting an en [...]