U.S. Senator from Colorado Michael Bennet, this week asked Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner what would happen if Congress failed to raise the debt limit. He received a swift reply, and it wasn’t pretty.
“It is absolutely urgent and essential that we craft a comprehensive plan that materially reduces the More…
This afternoon, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Office of Management and Budget Acting Director Jeffrey Zients gave one final report on the United States’ fiscal year:
Due to careful stewardship of the emergency programs, their effect on the deficit was much smaller than previously estimated. The Troubled Asset Relief
Yesterday, Wall Street giant J.P. Morgan Chase announced a $4.4 billion profit in the third quarter. Wall Street analysts should have cheered. Instead, they golf-clapped, while the bank’s chief executive officer, Jamie Dimon, went on the defensive on an earnings call.
[Economy1] The reason: foreclosures, again threatening everything from More…
This morning, President Obama held a meeting at the White House to press, again, for infrastructure investment. The time is right for massive infrastructure spending, the president said, because of the high rates of unemployment in construction and overwhelming need for the country to update its roads, railways, highways and More…
Today, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has an opinion piece in The New York Times entitled, awkwardly, “Welcome to the Recovery.” The article comes as economists project that unemployment might head back up into the 10 percent range, and on the day the Bureau of Economic Analysis released More…
Despite Republican objections, congressional Democrats did not include reforms of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or of the broader mortgage market in the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform bill — now law. The administration has promised comprehensive reform but thus far has not named any objectives, costs More…
Bruce Bartlett writes that there is little the Fed or the Treasury can do to winnow down unemployment in the face of congressional intransigence on additional stimulus:
[T]hose who advocate a monetary helicopter-drop of money to stimulate growth concede that the Fed doesn’t have the capacity to do it
Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner confirmed a well-known fact: The Obama administration and many congressional Democrats are in agreement that the bulk of the Bush tax cuts need to be kept in place, to keep the tax burden on middle-class families low. But to close the deficit, taxes need More…
Today, more stories are adding detail to the debate over whether Elizabeth Warren should become the first head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The discussion kicked off after the final passage of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform bill, which will become law when President Obama signs it tomorrow. More…
A day after the Senate approved sweeping financial reform legislation, White House senior adviser David Axelrod affirmed that President Obama is considering progressive favorite Elizabeth Warren to lead the consumer financial protection bureau.
Warren is “obviously a candidate to lead this effort,” Axelrod said on a call with reporters this More…
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