wall street

Congressional Democrats this week have been publicly incredulous that the credit card industry would have the temerity to raise rates and limit lending in the months before legislation restricting those practices takes hold. Indeed, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who in April asked the Federal Reserve to step in to prevent card issuers from raising rates [...]

Bank employees may not be digging into their pockets to make campaign contributions they way they used to, as Elana reports today, but those pockets are apparently becoming deep as they were during Wall Street’s boom times. According to The New York Times, Wall Street compensation is climbing again and may reach the same levels [...]

While Wall Street likes the Obama administration’s financial rescue plan and liberal economists Brad DeLong (pro) and Paul Krugman (anti) go head to head over its merits, The Wall Street Journal’s lead story today tells how the populist impulses of a Democratic White House have been checked in recent days by the president — and [...]

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner took to the podium Monday at the White House and made a startlingly naive plea to Wall Street about its responsibilities in the midst of the recession:
“You banks need to make the extra effort to make sure that good loans are getting to creditworthy small businesses,” he said, “in order to [...]

The New York Times took a stab at getting people who work on Wall Street to defend taking in more than $18 billion in bonuses — roughly the amount that was paid out in 2004, when the economy was just slightly different – and found that most aren’t owning up to ever getting the money.
From [...]

When Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) Friday called Wall Street executives “idiots” for using taxpayer money to pay out $18 billion in bonuses, then proposed that compensation for the employees of all bailout recipients be capped at $400,000 per year, it surely seemed to many Americans like an obvious limit to place on the Wall Street [...]

When Merrill Lynch snuck in $4 billion in executive bonuses just before its sale to Bank of America, nearly everyone I spoke with said that while the move was despicable, there wasn’t anything anyone could do. Taxpayers aren’t shareholders of Merrill, and they had to just stand by and watch.
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo [...]

President Obama’s scolding of the financial industry Thursday for awarding itself nearly $20 billion in bonuses during one of its worst years in decades pretty much speaks for itself. Instead of piling on here, let’s just turn instead to the late Myron Cope, the longtime voice of the Pittsburgh Steelers and the inventor of the [...]

Merrill Lynch — the former Wall Street titan that was recently acquired by Bank of America — like most investment banks, typically pays about 50 percent of its revenue in compensation. The chart (after the jump) depicts Merrill’s revenue and compensation data since 2000 — and it demonstrates that the Wall Street giant dramatically broke [...]

It’s Friday, which means the government is likely to announce the latest round of bank failures in the late afternoon. Calculated Risk expects commercial real estate to implode in 2009, meaning lots of small and regional banks may go under. So there’s something to look forward to.