Wall Street bailout

Just a few days after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke testified before House lawmakers about his role in Bank of America’s controversial buyout of Merrill Lynch, House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) announced that former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson will be the next official to take the hot seat.
Bank of America purchased [...]

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is testifying this morning before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about his role in catalyzing Bank of America’s controversial December buyout of Merrill Lynch.
The saga made headlines this spring when former BoA CEO Ken Lewis told New York’s attorney general that he was reluctant to go through with [...]

Just how tough are the Obama administration’s new executive compensation limits for bailed out firms? Well, as a hint, Wall Street sees them as no threat at all. Indeed, The Washington Post today gets a few telling quotes from bankers who are giddy that these are the only standards they’ll be held to.
“Our people kind [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Just a few weeks after Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) requested information from Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner about White House plans to sidestep executive pay limits for bailed out firms (information that still hasn’t been provided), Towns is asking Geithner about his role in Bank of America’s reportedly shady acquisition of Merrill Lynch in December.
Yesterday, the [...]

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, appearing today before the congressional bailout oversight panel, repeatedly emphasized the importance of transparency to the success of the rescue plan.
“In a crisis, transparency, accountability and a coherent plan with clear goals are essential to maintain the confidence of the public and capital markets,” he told the panel.
Funny, then, that Geithner [...]

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner appeared on Capitol Hill this morning, testifying for the first time before the congressional oversight panel created to monitor the Wall Street rescue plan. He didn’t have an easy time of things, getting grilled from the panel’s liberals and conservatives alike over things like rising foreclosures and the shift in government [...]

After months of dismal news coming out of Wall Street, a few rays of light have shown through in recent days. Last week, Wells Fargo announced a $3 billion profit in the first three months of 2009, and yesterday Goldman Sachs said it made $1.8 billion over the same span.
But at least one prominent economist [...]

It’s one of the central tenets of the government’s strategy to get banks lending again: Wealthy private investors such as hedge funds are being encouraged, with enormous financial backing from the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, to swoop in and snatch up the toxic securities held by banks and other lenders, thus thawing the frozen [...]