TARP

Public protections against fraud hang in the balance over the upcoming SEC budget battle.

The biggest story out of this weekend’s Tea Party protests, unfortunately for its organizers, seems to be the Duval County, Florida Republican Party’s endorsement of an event that featured an unusual number of “Obama = Hitler” signs. Jax Politics has photos which have been stripped from Facebook.
More, from Austin:
U.S. Sen. John Cornyn drew boos from [...]

While judges must recuse themselves from cases where financial interests are at stake, members of Congress regularly invest in the very companies they regulate.

Earlier this week, Legistorm discovered that the House Clerk’s Office had posted lawmakers’ latest financial disclosure forms — scheduled for release Friday — a few days early. The Washington Post dug through the records yesterday to find that some of the top cheerleaders for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, which the House passed in [...]

Seems that critics of the White House decision to bail out General Motors and Chrysler were right to question how well federal government would manage its enormous new investment. The New York Times reported today that the administration recently bought thousands of new vehicles, but a lion’s share of the money went to the only [...]

The Obama administration is poised to tap Kenneth Feinberg, the mediation guru who headed the 9/11 victim compensation fund, to monitor the nation’s bailed-out firms for compliance with executive compensation limits, The Wall Street Journal reported today. First, though, the White House has to sift through the tangle of executive pay restrictions imposed by Congress [...]

As the Senate this week debates legislation placing the tobacco industry under the oversight of the Food and Drug Administration, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) is proposing an amendment that would give every taxpayer an equal share in the 60 percent of General Motors just acquired by the federal government.
“It’s a pretty simple proposal,” Alexander told [...]

Over at TWI’s sister site, The Michigan Messenger, Eartha Jane Melzer caught former President George W. Bush’s first major domestic address since leaving office yesterday at the Economic Development Club of Southwest Michigan in the small town of Benton Harbor.
Eartha reports that while he refrained from directly criticizing his successor’s job performance, Bush echoed former [...]

As the Wall Street bailout nears its first anniversary, a risky aspect of the financial rescue has flown largely under the radar.

It’s not easy to recall, but the cornerstone of the administration’s policy to stabilize the banking system is the so-called PPIP — the Public-Private Investment Partnerships designed to help get troubled assets off the balance sheets of the nation’s banks. The idea was to use up to $100 billion in remaining Troubled Asset Relief Program [...]