This morning, Fannie Mae — a government-sponsored enterprise that buys mortgages on the secondary market and that made $72 billion in losses last year — reported a first-quarter loss of $13.1 billion. The company, under a governmental conservatorship, said it would seek $8.4 billion from the Treasury.
The More…
The Wall Street Journal’s Jon Hilsenrath has a good piece on the problems facing the Federal Reserve as it tries to slim down its balance sheet, now swollen with $1.1 trillion in mortgage-backed securities and totaling more than $2.3 trillion. The story notes:
Fed staff in the coming week
This afternoon, the Senate filed cloture on the nomination of Lael Brainard to become undersecretary for international affairs, one of the highest ranking positions in the Treasury Department. Both Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner are former undersecretaries for international affairs — the top governmental adviser on international economic More…
Kerry Killinger was the chairman and chief executive officer of Washington Mutual, the $300 billion savings-and-loan organization, from 1990 until 2008. During his tenure, he made more than $100 million in compensation, including more than $14 million in 2007 and $21 million in 2008 — granted for More…
The National Federation of Independent Business — the small-business lobbying organization — reports that small-business optimism declined in February. Small businesses reported smaller workforces and continued price cutting, among other sluggish stats. This chart encapsulates the continued bad times:
Increasingly, mainstream banks are offering products similar to payday loans — short-term, high-interest loans secured by a pending paycheck — according to a consumer group that called on the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to stop the practice.
Banks including Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank More…
Black homeowners are roughly 50 percent less likely than whites to receive help under the largest of the administration’s anti-foreclosure programs, according to a new survey of qualified families.
The findings have raised questions on Capitol Hill about the fairness of the program, led housing advocates to reiterate calls More…
It was a tough day to be Herbert Allison. The Treasury official charged with monitoring the $700 billion Wall Street bailout appeared Thursday before the congressional panel created for that same purpose — and was promptly lashed by committee members for evading many of the questions they hurled his way. More…
The co-CEO of the Pacific Investment Management Company, which currently employs former TARP head Neel Kashkari — whose job it was to rescue the U.S. economy — is no longer as in love with the Treasury as he once was. Today, and despite the deepening concerns about a More…
The latest political clamor over AIG, poised to combust next Wednesday at a House hearing on backdoor payments to banks that made risky deals with the company, centers on the Federal Reserve’s effort to conceal details of those payments. But senior officials, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, have so far More…
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