government bailout

Former President Bill Clinton now says that letting Lehman Bros. fail was a mistake that wound up clinching the election for then-candidate Barack Obama, reports Money & Company, the L.A. Times’ Business blog. Clinton’s remarks came before a meeting of the World Business Forum in New York on Wednesday, and were first reported in The [...]

Here’s one of the most disturbing points made in the Financial Times piece on banks being poised to earn $38.5 billion in overdraft fees this year: Poorest customers are getting hit the hardest by the charges.
The FT reported over the weekend that banks are using higher fees on overdrafts and credit cards to boost their [...]

Via Patrick.net, here’s more about how some banks abandoned their foreclosed properties and left innocent neighbors to deal with the blight. And no, this isn’t just happening in Cleveland. In Petaluma, Calif.,  one neighbor got so fed up fighting with Bank of America– for two years — to clean up the abandoned home next door [...]

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 efforts to put an end to [...]

Just how much did top AIG executives pocket last year in bonuses? Politico reports the total awards paid out were four times higher than previously reported, based on new responses from AIG to queries by Rep. Elijah Commings (D-Md.).
AIG now says it paid out more than $454 million in bonuses to its employees for work [...]

Bank employees may not be digging into their pockets to make campaign contributions they way they used to, as Elana reports today, but those pockets are apparently becoming deep as they were during Wall Street’s boom times. According to The New York Times, Wall Street compensation is climbing again and may reach the same levels [...]

James Scurlock, director of “Maxed Out,” a groundbreaking documentary on consumer debt, steps up to defend TARP oversight panel head Elizabeth Warren today in The Big Money. Scurlock says that “no one grasps the true nature of our hard times” better than Warren, a longtime scholar of consumer debt and bankruptcy.

This should have happened a long time ago: Banks that received government bailout money and  continue to charge consumers excessive fees on credit cards and other services are getting a second look, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The committee overseeing federal banking-bailout programs is investigating the lending practices of institutions that received public funds, following a [...]

This weekend, we’ve seen busloads of protesters pulling up to the posh homes of AIG executives in Fairfield, Conn. — even as the realization creeps in that that our populist anger may be misplaced.
Maybe the real outrage is the covert second bailout to Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and other investment houses that were AIG’s [...]

Bailed-out insurance giant AIG will no doubt be a heated topic of discussion today, with The Wall Street Journal and other news organizations reporting that the failed and essentially insolvent company is vowing to pay out $450 million in bonuses to its “top performers” — you know, the folks in the financial products unit, many [...]