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By Rachel Corrie
$16.29
By Andy Borowitz
$28.70
$22
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Ian Muttoo (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Homeownership is at its lowest level in 18 years, but housing prices are rising. Why? Because banks are creating real estate scarcity by buying up homes and selectively stalling foreclosures.
Posted on May 3, 2013
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kevin dooley (CC BY 2.0)
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This month we learned that regulators will not reveal any shenanigans discovered by the highly paid “independent” consultants big banks hired under orders from the government to review potential wrongdoing on their part in the foreclosure/robo-signing scandal.
Posted on Apr 30, 2013
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alexander amatosi (CC BY-ND 2.0)
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The Federal Reserve confirmed Wednesday that one of its internal websites was accessed after the hacktivist group Anonymous claimed to have stolen information on more than 4,000 banking executives.
Posted on Feb 6, 2013
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JoshuaDavisPhotography (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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The editors at The New York Times are not impressed with the deal struck between the government and major banks to provide borrowers with $8.5 billion in aid.
Posted on Jan 9, 2013
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Bonnetmaker (CC BY 2.0)
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One-third of British bankers would rather be elsewhere, doing other things, says a new survey by eFinancialCareers of more than 500 professionals in the industry.
Posted on Dec 26, 2012
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swanksalot (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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JPMorgan Chase & Co. weathered the 2008 financial crisis without reporting a loss. But a failed hedging strategy that recently cost the company $2 billion has called into question the ability of its leaders to manage risk and intensified the debate on banking reform.
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Gamma Man (CC-BY)
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By Ellen Brown, Truthout —
Conventional wisdom holds that government bureaucrats are bad businesspeople. But around the world, the many countries with strong public banking sectors generally have strong, stable economies.
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DonkeyHotey (CC-BY)
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By Jesse Eisinger, ProPublica —
In late 2010, a major regulator warned the Federal Reserve: Banks are not healthy enough to increase dividends, and the economy could implode again. But the Fed ignored that advice.
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Wikimedia Commons
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Hey, anyone want to bail Alabama out? More specifically, Jefferson County in the Heart of Dixie, which includes the fair city of Birmingham and is also a gobsmacking $3 billion in the hole from a botched sewer deal.
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AP / Bebeto Matthews
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Some 400 Occupy Wall Street protesters got into costume Friday, but the occasion wasn’t an early observance of the beloved pagan-inspired holiday that is Halloween. Rather, the messengers from among OWS ranks paid visits to big bank headquarters in Manhattan to deliver mail from Americans ... (more)
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AP / Daniel Roland
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This week’s European crisis summit in Brussels has produced an agreement in an effort to mitigate what was looking like an inevitable economic catastrophe, judging by the dire situation in Greece and elsewhere in the eurozone. By Thursday, international markets were registering the results.
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guardian.co.uk
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WikiLeaks’ days may be numbered, or at least its function as Web-based whistle-blower may be seriously compromised, if the muckraking site Julian Assange built doesn’t sort out its money issues soon. These issues, Assange was careful to note on Monday, were caused by the deliberate stranglehold ... (more)
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Flickr / I-5 Design & Manufacture
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Bank of America has confirmed a plan to eliminate 30,000 jobs “over the next few years,” 10,000 fewer than what The Wall Street Journal reported Friday. The layoffs will amount to about 10 percent of the bank’s workforce. Update (more)
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AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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By Robert Scheer — These threatened programs are not government handouts to a privileged class, like defense contractors and bailed-out bankers, who do feel eminently entitled to pig out at the federal trough.
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Flickr / Policy Network
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After six straight weeks of a falling Dow and a period of stalled economic growth, the stagnation of national recovery is glaringly visible to everyone—except our representatives in Washington, says Robert Reich.
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democracynow.org
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This week we tip our hat to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who once helped calculate the true cost of the Iraq War, and more recently has been calling attention to the radical redistribution of wealth from middle- and working-class Americans to the richest among us.
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AP / Jason DeCrow
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By Robert Scheer — The delusion of a classless America in which opportunity is equally distributed is the most effective deception perpetrated by the moneyed elite that controls all the key levers of power in what passes for our democracy.
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Flickr / Tracy O (CC-BY-SA)
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Big banking execs on Wall Street might have noticed a slight pinch in their cash bonuses last year, but that doesn’t mean those clever business minds didn’t find a way to make up for it through other financial channels.
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AP / Louis Lanzano
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It appears that some higher-ups at JPMorgan Chase were on to fraudster Bernie Madoff nearly two years before the catastrophic implosion of his Ponzi scheme, but said execs didn’t take this knowledge as reason enough to stop doing business with him.
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Flickr / kevindooley (CC-BY)
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An international panel of banking regulators from 27 nations is aiming to crack down on outlandish pay packages for industry executives by proposing a new set of rules that call for more transparency and, wonder of wonders, some correlation between ...
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AP / Seth Wenig
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By Robert Scheer — Welcome to the brave new world of post-bailout capitalism. The Commerce Department announced Tuesday that corporate profits are at their highest level in U.S. history, and the Fed released minutes of an early November meeting in which officials predicted a stagnant economy and continued high unemployment.
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Those of us who have stood aghast and watched as Goldman Sachs seemed to sail almost unscathed through the erupting economic catastrophe of the last two years (thank you, bailout!) might stop now for a moment of pure schadenfreude, as the megabank’s profits took a precipitous dive in the second quarter of this year.
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AP / Virginia Mayo
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Looks like banking executives in EU member nations will have to settle for slightly less ginormous bonuses in the coming year, once the European Parliament puts its official stamp on an agreement to limit banking bonuses and severance packages.
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Flickr / kdinuraj
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By day’s end Wednesday, our chums over at the U.S. Senate hadn’t moved much closer to the finish line in dealing with the financial regulation bill, to the chagrin of some senators and, no doubt, the satisfaction of others.
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When big financial institutions got themselves into a serious pickle in the fall of 2008, the Federal Reserve was there with beaucoup bucks in loans to prop them up. On Tuesday, the Senate voted unanimously to launch an inquiry into the Fed’s lending practices during the financial crisis.
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In a newly available interview, Truthdig’s Chris Hedges sits down with filmmaker Michael Moore and poignantly argues that capitalism is driving humanity’s downfall. Moore conducted the interview for his latest movie, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” but eventually cut it from the documentary.
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Wikimedia Commons / United States Federal Reserve
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The Federal Reserve announced Thursday it would increase the interest rate for temporary bank loans. The New York Times reports that many on Wall Street see this as signaling an end to big bank profits. But some economists say the move was purely technical, with no real effect on how much money is made.
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Wikimedia Commons / Prolineserver
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There are few things, we imagine, that could elicit a heartfelt OMG (make that O.M.G., rather) from certified economics whiz and evident adult Paul Krugman, but President Barack Obama’s latest take on the egregious and profane bonuses of Wall Street executives has clearly tripped that wire in Krugman’s mind.
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AP / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — Finally President Barack Obama has come to his senses on financial regulation. His endorsement of what he calls the “Volcker Rule” for once puts him squarely on the side of ordinary Americans as opposed to the banking bandits who have so thoroughly fleeced the public.
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AP / Eugene Hoshiko
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By Robert Scheer — The Chinamen did it. In the great American tradition of finding foreign scapegoats for our problems, the hunt is on to somehow hold China responsible for the misery that Wall Street financiers inflicted upon the world.
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Today on the list: Twitter for your Jewish mother, why the health care bill supporters are full of it, inheriting 9/11 and more.
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AP / Henny Ray Abrams
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In what is being hailed as the biggest bid to change financial regulation since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, the House of Representatives on Friday passed the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009. In a press conference after the vote, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi proclaimed, “We are sending a clear message to Wall Street: The party is over.”
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EPA / Win McNamee
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It looks like the G-20 is set to permanently replace the G-7 as the world’s dominant economic forum, an indirect admission that there was something unfair about the world’s seven wealthiest countries deciding economic policy for the entire globe.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — A president has only so much capital to expend, both in tax dollars and public tolerance, and Barack Obama is dangerously overdrawn. He has tried to have it all on three fronts, and his administration is in serious danger of going bankrupt.
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bloomberg.com
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Swiss bank accounts aren’t what they used to be. Switzerland recently agreed to fork over information on 4,450 UBS AG bank accounts to the IRS as an investigation into suspected tax evasion threatens the good name that Swiss banking has provided to money launderers and tax evaders for centuries.
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President Obama is gambling on America’s readiness to embrace a larger, more comprehensive form of government, but will it take? “Recovering Republican” Arianna Huffington argues that the system Obama favors is currently working best for oligarchs, not those losing their homes or worried about their health care, while Tony Blankley thinks Big Pharma is pitching camp in the White House.
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AP / Susan Walsh
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By Robert Scheer — “Was there some sort of ghost that performed these actions?” New York federal Judge Jed S. Rakoff demanded to know Monday in rejecting a deal that would let Bank of America off the hook in yet another banker bonus scandal.
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AP photo / Rich Pedroncelli
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By Robert Scheer — I expected a federal government that has spent trillions salvaging the banks that got us into this mess to find the relatively minor sums needed to bail out California and other states that have been the victims of Wall Street’s dangerous games. But I didn’t count on the tough-love steeliness of the Obama administration.
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Alert the media—banks need money! Who’s stressed, who’s reassured by the government’s test of the banks’ capitalization? Meanwhile, Pakistan is in serious danger, and Afghanistan is hardly a model of an emerging democracy. Their leaders are in Washington; what will America’s role be?
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AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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By Robert Scheer — We are so inured to tales of business corruption that even a devastating exposé in The Wall Street Journal no longer shocks us. The fact that the chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank made millions off his secret purchase of Goldman Sachs stock has barely registered a blip of outrage.
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weblogs.cltv.com
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What would have happened to the likes of Gordon Gekko, the ultra-sharky villain of Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street,” in the current economic climate? We’re about to find out, as Stone and Michael Douglas, who first brought the unabashedly greedy Gekko to life in 1987, are gearing up to make a sequel to the classic financial cautionary tale.
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AP photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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By Robert Scheer — We are being robbed big-time, but you can’t say we haven’t been warned. Not after the release Tuesday of a scathing report by the Treasury Department’s special inspector general, who charged that the aptly named Troubled Asset Relief Program is rife with mismanagement and potential for fraud.
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The economy’s not the only thing that “Left, Right & Center” co-conspirators Matt Miller, Tony Blankley and Robert Scheer are thinking about this week, but it’s a biggie again, as are the Obama administration’s announcement about defense spending and the changes under way in American foreign policy. Also: Somali pirates!
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — Not surprisingly, Lawrence Summers is convinced that he deserved every penny of the $8 million that Wall Street firms paid him last year. And why shouldn’t he be cut in on the loot from the loopholes in the toxic derivatives market that he pushed into law when he was Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary?
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hoinews.com
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When word got out that Sen. Chris Dodd was responsible for loosening the restrictions on executive bonuses while drafting the stimulus bill, his constituents were apparently listening, as the Democrat’s approval rating in his home state of Connecticut has hit an all-time low. Now he could be in danger of losing his Senate seat in 2010.
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Disagreement abounds on this week’s episode of “Left, Right & Center,” especially when it comes to President Obama’s budget plan and the origins of the economic crisis it’s intended to remedy. Who’s the moderator again? And is Bobby Jindal done for?
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This week’s episode of “Left, Right & Center” finds the full lineup of co-hosts—Matt Miller, Tony Blankley, Arianna Huffington and Robert Scheer—debating the latest developments in the unholy marriage between big banks and the U.S. government, speculating about what might be done about the American auto industry and doing a little on-the-fly analysis of comparative economic systems. Listen and learn.
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icsd.k12.ny.us
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The rationale of the TARP bailout’s “capital-injection program”—providing banks with capital that will increase loans to consumers and businesses—has apparently been forgotten by the 20 largest banks that received TARP money. A Treasury Department survey has found that lending in the last quarter of 2008 was stagnant, or even slightly declined, despite $250 billion in capital-injection funds.
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Was it too much to expect a show of contrition or sacrifice when CEOs from eight of the nation’s biggest banks turned up on Capitol Hill last week to dodge questions about how they used their respective chunks of bailout change? Probably.
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tumblr.com
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The world economy this year is likely to grow at a rate of only 0.5 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund, which re-evaluated its figures after the U.K. officially entered into recession last week. The growth rate, as projected, is the lowest in more than 60 years.
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