toxic assets

It’s hard to imagine now, but it wasn’t all that long ago when it could be hard to find average folks who knew or cared that much about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the oddly-named, government-sponsored entitites that own or guarantee about half the nation’s mortgages. The obscure workings of the secondary market weren’t exactly [...]

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 [...]

In trying to figure out whether Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s plan to subsidize investors buying toxic assets from banks makes any difference in the lives of people living in blighted communities, I’ve been talking to housing advocates and economists.
Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, cautioned that we should “have no [...]

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is back in the spotlight today. He’s scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill about his new plan for the government to greatly expand its oversight of the financial industry, included hedge funds. Geithner, of course, has been in the news a lot lately, as debate continues over his other plan, the [...]

Reading the resignation letter from the former AIG executive who had nothing to do with credit default swaps but has been vilified regardless, you see the other side of the story, a way to feel some sympathy for top financial executives caught in the same crisis that’s dragging all of us down.
But then you find [...]

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) challenged Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner today to release details of bonuses given to executives of companies that have received TARP funds, Talking Points Memo reports.
When Geithner didn’t immediately jump on the idea, Sherman jumped on him.
“You won’t commit to telling the American people how many folks at Goldman, Sachs or AIG [...]

At Housing Wire, they’re not debating the details of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s toxic assets plan that is expected to beannounced today. They’re just dismissing the whole thing as a monumental waste of time and wondering about this: Why aren’t we just re-creating a model that already works? There’s one easily at hand:  the Resolution [...]

Via Angry Bear, here’s Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize-winning economist, on Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson Jr. celebrating the bailout plan he presented to Congress, which was revised in marathon negotiations this weekend:
The champagne bottle corks were popping as Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson announced his trillion-dollar bailout for the banks, buying up their toxic mortgages. To [...]