great depression

With the mortgage crisis dragging on and no quick fix in sight, lots of new ideas to help people stay in their homes are floating around. Maybe one upside to the lack of action on stopping foreclosures is an opening for some innovation — for ways to break through the complications that seem to be [...]

Once again, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. shut down a bank late Friday afternoon, meaning that news was mostly missed until today. It’s Alpharatta, Ga.-based Alpha Bank and Trust, a small community banking outfit, Housing Wire reports. It’s the 16th bank failure so far this year.
The reality that banks are closing down — and [...]

When an economic bailout gets political, all bets are off. Look what happened when the German banking system melted down during the Weimar Republic in 1931.

So President Bush took on the enormous task of explaining the financial crisis to Americans in simple, clear terms last night – and singled out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for blame. Bush said they “fueled the market for questionable investments.”
The two agencies obviously have their problems, or the government wouldn’t have seized them earlier [...]

As Ari Melber and Matt DeLong have reported on our site, both presidential candidates are keeping up their war of words over Wall Street’s financial crisis and the state of the nation’s economy. You might think that things have changed a lot since last week, when I pointed out that both candidates had been ignoring [...]