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By Thomas Sowell
$19.77
By David Sirota
$10.17
$18
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Flickr / eflon
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Those financial institutions that viewed last year’s bailout as an object lesson that they can carry on as they wish so long as they’re “too big to fail” may have to adopt another approach. At least, that was the message Monday from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, if he makes good on words of warning to big banks.
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stltoday.com
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Thank the regulatory heavens. The Federal Reserve is moving to prohibit banks from charging overdraft fees on ATM and debit card transactions unless the customer has opted into a program agreeing to pay the extra charges. Banks raked in $37 billion in fees last year, largely through unexplained programs and extraordinarily high levies.
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AP / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — There is an odd disconnect between the furious public debate over health care reform, with its emphasis on the cost of an increased government role, and the nonexistent discussion about the far more expensive and largely secretive government program to bail out Wall Street.
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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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Flickr / billaday
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A report released by the Federal Reserve on Wednesday gave some indications that, for half of the districts tracked by the Fed and for certain markets, the American economy is slowly starting to revive from its near-death experience last fall.
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Wikimedia Commons / United States Federal Reserve
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After heading up the Fed during the nation’s biggest economic catastrophe in decades, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke will be nominated to continue his role for a second term, according to another top Obama adviser, David Axelrod.
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Federal Reserve
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After seemingly endless months of relentlessly distressing financial reports, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said Friday that the economic news is looking up on both the national and global economic fronts, and that “prospects for a return to growth in the near term appear good.”
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kc.frb.org
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On Sunday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke met the media, or at least PBS “NewsHour” anchor Jim Lehrer, along with some concerned citizens of Kansas City, Mo., to discuss how the Fed has dealt with the ongoing economic catastrophe over the past few months.
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AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke presented a report Tuesday about the U.S. economy’s health. On the “bright side,” the economy appears to be declining at a slower rate than before, but home prices are still falling, credit is still very tight and, oh yeah, job losses are still rising. As a result of all the good news, the Fed intends to maintain “exceptionally low” interest rates for a while longer.
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Although he went down insisting that his relationship to Goldman Sachs had been “mischaracterized,” New York Federal Reserve Chairman Stephen Friedman resigned on Thursday after The Wall Street Journal, with a boost from Truthdig, brought up the issue of a potential conflict of interest earlier this week.
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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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AP photo / Susan Walsh
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The good news: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke believes the U.S. economy may show signs of bouncing back before 2010—yay! The bad news: Bernanke also believes that aftershocks from the recession may continue to wreak havoc for a good while to come—sigh.
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AP photo / Mary Altaffer
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By Robert Scheer — The good news on the government’s “No Banker Left Behind” program is that, according to the special inspector general’s report on Tuesday, the total handout to date is still less than 3 trillion dollars. It’s only $2.98 trillion, to be precise, an amount six times greater than will be spent by federal, state and local governments this year on educating the 50 million American children in elementary and secondary schools.
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AP photo / Harry Hamburg
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There has been much hand-wringing, not to mention finger-pointing, regarding who knew what, and when, about the financial calamities that have recently come to pass. However, Brooksley Born and Sheila Bair won’t be counted among the willfully or accidentally ignorant: They’ve been named this year’s winners of the JFK Profile in Courage Award for sounding the alarm far ahead of time.
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AP photo / Susan Walsh
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In testifying before Congress on Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner asked for what he called “new resolution authority” to grant the federal government the ability to more successfully take on financial institutions like AIG (i.e., non-banks) in the future.
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Flickr/dcJohn
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Faced with the glaring problem of indulgence and intractability on the highest tiers of Wall Street’s corporate behemoths, the Obama administration is putting together a plan to make financial institutions more accountable and more transparent to the government and to the taxpayers who granted them buoyancy.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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We’ve seen a lot of Timothy Geithner lately in the news—usually looking concerned yet purposeful as he stands behind the president in photos and press conferences—but we haven’t heard a great deal straight from the source. On Thursday, CNN’s Ali Velshi managed to get the treasury secretary talking, but what Geithner had to say is distinctly underwhelming.
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Wikimedia Commons/Prolineserver
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The American economy is certainly a cause for concern at the moment, but Paul Krugman is more troubled by issues abroad, declaring in his New York Times column on Monday that “the situation in Europe worries me even more than the situation in America.” Uh-oh.
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In a rare interview with Ben Bernanke broadcast Sunday on “60 Minutes,” the Federal Reserve chairman allowed himself to sound slightly more optimistic, although ever so cautiously so, about the possibility that the American economy will pull out of recession soon—perhaps, he said, by the end of this year.
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AP photo / Mark Lennihan
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By Robert Scheer — We’ve already given AIG a total of $170 billion—an amount that dwarfs the $75 billion allocated to helping those millions of homeowners facing foreclosures. And more will be thrown down the AIG rat hole because President Barack Obama is blindly following the misguided advice of his top economic advisers, who insist that AIG is too big to fail.
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topnews.in
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While he was able to give the banking business a little lift on Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke also delivered the sobering news that the economy as a whole isn’t likely to make big gains in terms of recovery before 2010 or later.
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AP photo / Richard Drew
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This just in: Not everything is completely awful in the financial arena. Rejoice—stocks went up a little bit! Even if it’s just because Fed Chair Ben Bernanke assured Wall Street that our nation’s banks won’t be nationalized soon, and even if the 2 percent rise happened a day after the Dow dipped to 12-year lows.
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AP photo / Lawrence Jackson
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By Robert Scheer — What an insipid anticlimax! Rising to “a challenge more complex than our financial system has ever faced,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner promised on Tuesday to give trillions more to the very folks who profited from that malignant complexity.
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Flickr / respres
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After pumping hundreds of billions into the banking system with not much to show for it, Fed chief Ben Bernanke says he will try to reduce the number of foreclosures. As he put it to Rep. Barney Frank: “The goal of the policy is to avoid preventable foreclosures on residential mortgage assets that are held, owned or controlled by a Federal Reserve Bank.”
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Federal Reserve
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Ben Bernanke and his squad of rate setters are expected to cut interest by as much as three-quarters of a point on Tuesday. With rates already at 1 percent, we mortals are left wondering what the Fed chief plans to do when he runs out of rates to cut. Update
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publicradio.org
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The mortgage market got a lift following Tuesday’s announcement that the Federal Reserve was throwing in with a $600 billion resuscitation bid, but as Fortune’s Colin Barr points out, history offers at least two examples that the road ahead could be rocky.
Posted on Nov 25, 2008
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AP photo / Mary Altaffer
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By Titus Levi — Wall Street has yet to recover after the economic shocks of recent weeks. Why? Two problems. One we already know: The “plan,” even with revisions, is deeply flawed. The second problem has not been mentioned all that much because it’s pretty scary: Put simply, we have no idea what we’re doing.
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group30.org
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Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker said Tuesday that the U.S. was already in a recession, despite the efforts of the U.S. government and other nations’ leaders to intervene. “I have seen a lot of crises but I have never seen anything quite like this one,” said Volcker, who headed up the Fed for eight years before Alan Greenspan took over in 1987.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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To help all those still reeling from sudden onset econo-tastrophe syndrome, the BBC has put together a handy timeline, which connects the dots between events over the last couple years but doesn’t quite take the long view, thus leaving out a few key moments and players from, say, the 1990s (paging Phil Gramm).
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momocrats.typepad.com
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And now, this latest dispatch from the U.S. Department of Unintentional Irony: Sen. John McCain spoke out against the Federal Reserve’s recent bids to give life support (read: gigantic amounts of money) to failing financial institutions. Isn’t he the same guy who has looked to Phil Gramm for economic advice?
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Stagflation: It’s always sounded like a dirty word, and is hopelessly tied to retro jokes about the ‘70s. But with GDP growth already, well, stagnant, the Labor Department announced Thursday that July saw the highest rate of inflation in 17 years, meaning you can now appropriately drop the word into water cooler convo without seeming like a potty-mouth or a retro hipster. On the downside, you are now paying 5.6 percent more for things than you did at this time last year.
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AP photo / Lisa Poole
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The once-mighty U.S. dollar is full of hot air, or at least the rate of inflation is at a 26-year high due to the recent economic toils and astronomical energy prices. Prices U.S. consumers pay shot up 1.1 percent in June—or more directly, your paycheck just got 1.1 percent smaller.
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Flickr / wwarby
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Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke expects America’s economic struggles to continue well into next year and has asked Congress to expand his regulatory powers. Lawmakers are unlikely to fulfill his request any time soon. Bernanke also suggested that the Fed could continue to bail out investment banks.
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broadcatching.wordpress.com
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Seems like everything is a crisis these days, what with the subprime mortgage crisis, the oil crisis and, perhaps most troubling of all, the climate change crisis. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan acknowledged the complexity and interconnectedness of these unsettling trends Tuesday, stopping short of declaring that a major recession is on the way but without ruling out a recession of lesser magnitude.
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AP photo / Reed Saxon
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By Stanley Kutler — With our economic and financial crises deepening, government insiders reportedly are debating whether we need to restore some regulation—or not. Given the state of things, we can expect further woes and no regulation.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — That idiotic “what, me worry?” look just never leaves the man’s visage. Once again there was our president, presiding over disasters in part of his making and totally on his watch, grinning with an aplomb that suggested a serious disconnect between his worldview and existing reality.
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France 24
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Those hoping for better news about the state of the U.S. economy—not to mention the bigger picture—aren’t going to hear it from former Fed chair Alan Greenspan anytime soon, judging by his ominous forecast released Monday.
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AP photo / Haraz N. Ghankari
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President George W. Bush has often invited comparisons to Mad magazine antihero Alfred E. Neuman, and his latest comments regarding a potential recession in the U.S. aren’t helping him shake the “What, me worry?” tag line anytime soon.
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The short month of February was long on economic problems, as 63,000 U.S. jobs were lost over the 29 days. In other words, for those betting that a recession isn’t around the corner, the outlook is dim.
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Officials at the Federal Reserve are running out of creative ways to stave off a recession and expect the U.S. economy to slow to a crawl in 2008, with a growth rate of only 1.3 to 2 percent over the year.
Posted on Feb 20, 2008
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The term “subprime mortgage” has certainly been in heavy rotation in recent months, and economic panic has spread as a result of lenders playing fast and loose with their home-lending criteria, causing chaos in the mortgage market. Enter the Federal Reserve to try to undo some of the damage and prevent a recurrence.
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Alan Greenspan is no fan of the Bush administration or the once-dominant congressional Republicans. In his new memoir, “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,” the former Federal Reserve chairman disparages the two groups for violating the GOP’s values on spending and small government. Updated
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By Andy Borowitz — The satirist reports that, desperate to protect their endangered fortunes, thousands of the nation’s leading hedge-fund managers converged on Washington today in “The Million Mercedes March.”
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The Economist
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Alan Greenspan used his powers of economic foresight Monday to caution Americans about a possible upcoming recession. While the former Fed chairman stressed that he can’t accurately predict changes far in advance, Greenspan speculated that we may see a dip in the economy within the year.
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