Wall Street bailout

The finance industry, seeming to forget that it was responsible for the economic turmoil that’s pushed unemployment above 10 percent, is lobbying furiously (and successfully) against Democratic legislation designed to protect consumers and prevent a similar episode in the future.
Yesterday, industry representatives held a conference call with reporters boasting about just how effective they’re fight [...]

Equating today’s rising credit card rates to usury, several House Democrats today announced plans to introduce legislation capping credit card rates at 16 percent.
“Things were a lot better for the average person in this country when we had usury caps,” Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), head of the House Rules Committee, said in a statement announcing her bill. [...]

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner got an earful last week from House Democrats wary of the White House proposal to pay for government rescues of Wall Street firms by taxing healthy competitors only after Washington steps in. The critics want companies to pre-pay instead into a kind of sitting insurance fund to be used for the [...]

It’s no mystery that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is the ultimate Wall Street insider. But it seems that more and more Democrats are losing their patience with what they perceive as his protectionism of the finance industry at the expense of consumers and taxpayers. The latest to weigh in is Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who [...]

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who’s testifying this morning before the House Financial Services Committee on legislation empowering the White House to take over Wall Street firms when their failure threatens the finance system on the whole, just made a curious claim. Asked by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) whether the legislation grants the White House the [...]

Different bill; same concerns.
House Democrats introduced legislation Tuesday granting the White House broad new authority to bail out investment houses and other non-banks when their potential collapse is a threat to the larger financial system. But while the bill goes far beyond a similar White House proposal in terms of protecting taxpayers, Rep. Brad Sherman [...]

A House Oversight and Government Reform hearing on the controversial merger between Bank of America and Merrill Lynch has been postponed “due to additional documents recently received,” the panel announced today.
The hearing, initially to be held Thursday, has not been rescheduled.

He was practically a fixture on Capitol Hill during the Wall Street bailout debate and subsequent oversight discussions. But Ken Lewis, CEO of Bank of America, is set to retire at the end of the year.
Lewis and BoA have been in hot water over their government-backed deal to acquire the failing Merrill Lynch in December. [...]

Less than two weeks after Goldman Sachs posted record quarterly profits, some congressional lawmakers are wondering if the Wall Street giant isn’t taking dangerous risks in its investment strategy — risks similar to those that led to the recent financial collapse.
In a letter today to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, 10 House lawmakers are asking [...]

Since the Wall Street bailout was signed into law last October, critics of the strategy have often been met with a central reassurance from leaders of the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve: The taxpayer-funded rescue, these officials have said, is not a bailout at all, but an investment that could very well return the [...]