National People’s Action and the Public Accountability Initiative are up with a report on financial links between payday lenders, Main Street banks and Wall Street banks. “While small businesses and individuals have struggled to get affordable loans in the wake of the taxpayer bailouts, payday lenders have received new More…
Bloomingdale — a pretty neighborhood in central Washington, D.C., with brightly painted Victorian townhouses and wide tree-lined streets — is gentrifying. Ten years ago, it had problems with gangs, robberies and drug-related violence. Today those issues are greatly reduced, thanks in large part to the efforts of the neighborhood’s tight-knit More…
Mortgage servicers have not done enough to help struggling homeowners avoid foreclosure, a leading Democrat said Wednesday, and Congress must now step in with new legislation to help them salvage their troubled loans.
“We have not seen servicers participating in any significant way,” Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the More…
Is the sky falling? Are pigs flying? Apparently Wall Street executives have become sensitive to the fact that while people are losing their jobs and their homes, financial industry executives are getting set to reap big year-end bonuses, courtesy of the American taxpayer.
They’re actually thinking of curbing some of More…
In perhaps the greatest financial paroxysm yet, a spate of gigantic mergers sparked by the recent global crisis has overnight reordered the American economic landscape — if not America itself.
Once almighty Wall Street is being forced by its nosediving fortunes into a shotgun marriage with Main Street — relying More…
Three sound-bites led to the passage of the biggest bailout in world history. The first was that the bailout is “not just for the fat cats” on Wall Street. This, in turn, is because in this crisis “Wall Street and Main Street are joined at the hip.” Finally, anybody who More…
For people facing foreclosure — and for the housing and community development groups trying to help them — there’s been little to cheer about lately.
The $700-billion bailout bill approved last week offers little or nothing to homeowners in trouble. A measure to change federal law to allow bankruptcy judges More…
Late last month, as Congress was on its way to passing the $700-billion Wall Street bailout plan, another economic stimulus measure died a quiet death in the Senate.
That $58-billion proposal would have extended unemployment benefits, pumped billions of dollars into local infrastructure projects and increased funding for low-income nutrition More…
For weeks, the presidential and vice presidential candidates have been pounding the Wall Street vs. Main Street trope into our heads. Now, the good people at National Public Radio have a new take on the issue.
They found 70 towns and cities from Connecticut to California where Wall Street and More…
The folks over at The Corner think Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin went off base a bit last night when she blamed the housing crisis on predatory lenders. They wanted her to go after irresponsible borrowers, the Community Reinvestment Act – they call it the Carter/Clinton CRA More…
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