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By Jonathan Schell $24.00
By Ellen E. Schultz
$22
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 Wonderlane (CC BY 2.0)
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Rather than fight its way through court, Bank of America has dipped into its “litigation reserves” to settle a shareholder lawsuit over the dubious methods it used to acquire Merrill Lynch as the credit crisis ramped up.
Posted on Sep 28, 2012
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 scott*eric (CC BY 2.0)
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By Cora Currier, ProPublica —
The hedge fund Magnetar helped create billions of dollars’ worth of collateralized debt obligations that super-charged the financial meltdown, profited the company enormously and for which it’s seen no punishment. Here’s a roundup of the known charges, settlements, and investigations that stem from those deals.
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Pat Bagley, Cagle Cartoons, Salt Lake Tribune —
Posted on Sep 22, 2011
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 Flickr / chatswoodfp
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While the rest of us patiently await the signs of economic recovery, corporate America has apparently skipped to the front of the line: Major companies are expecting to announce some of their highest profits in years.
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 U.S. Department of State
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John Thain is back. The ex-CEO of Merrill Lynch, who also once held top posts at Goldman Sachs and the New York Stock Exchange, has returned to the Wall Street fold, this time as chairman and CEO of the CIT Group. However, this time, one imagines, he won’t have a $35K commode at his disposal.
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 AP / Alex Brandon
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By Marcia Alesan Dawkins — New Yorkers, beware. It seems that former U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr., a transplant from Tennessee, has upset people again. Ford, an executive at Merrill Lynch and a New York University lecturer who might be seeking to unseat fellow Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand of New York in a race for the U.S. Senate, has made a very bold statement about his identity.
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 AP / Haraz N. Ghanbari
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By Robert Scheer — Maybe I got it wrong. During the presidential campaign I wrote columns blasting Sen. John McCain for siding with the big bankers on deregulation, citing his choosing ex-Sen. Phil Gramm, currently a vice chairman of the Swiss-owned banking giant UBS, as his presidential campaign chair.
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 AP / Susan Walsh
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Another head of another big bank is rolling ... all the way out the door. On Wednesday, Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis made the startling announcement that he was opting to take early retirement, effective the last day of this calendar year.
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 Flickr / World Resources Institute Staff
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It’s been nearly a year since Lehman Brothers went belly-up, effectively kicking off the financial implosion of fall 2008. However, despite the firm’s catastrophic demise, some Lehman execs managed to land on their feet. Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal gives an update about their current activities.
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 AP / Mark Lennihan
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By Robert Scheer — By now everybody must know that the top banking executives responsible for our economic meltdown have no shame. Otherwise they would not have dared give themselves such hefty bonuses as a deeply perverse reward for actions that caused millions of Americans to lose their jobs and homes.
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 ceoworld.biz
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It’s baffling how $33 million can seem like a relatively small sum lately, but given that it’s all that Bank of America will have to pay the SEC for failing to inform investors about the billions in bonuses the bank paid Merrill Lynch executives during B of A’s acquisition of Merrill last year, it seems more like a light knuckle-rap than a full-on spanking.
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 AP photo / Nell Redmond
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Kenneth D. Lewis was relieved of the Bank of America chairmanship by shareholders Wednesday in a backlash from the highly criticized Merrill Lynch acquisition. He does, however, retain his two other titles, president and CEO.
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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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 White House / Pete Souza
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Although they’re allotted $100,000 to redecorate, Barack and Michelle Obama will spend their own money updating the White House. The first family has turned to Michael S. Smith for the task. The designer has worked for Steven Spielberg, Rupert Murdoch and former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, whose decorating habits have come to epitomize corporate greed.
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 thecrimson.com
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New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo sent out subpoenas to Bank of America’s Chief Administrative Officer J. Steele Alphin and recently ousted Merrill Lynch Chief Executive John Thain on Tuesday to look into hefty bonuses paid to Merrill Lynch higher-ups late last year—even as the company was bleeding billions in losses.
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 0-60mag.com
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Sure, we’ve all heard the stories about Wall Street bigwigs lining their pockets with gold dubloons while the rest of us scramble to save pennies, but The New York Times has drawn out that contrast in graphic detail with a handy series of charts showing the total earnings (including bonuses) of 12 top executives from 2003-2007.
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What to make of the bailouts and sellouts that dominated the past week’s financial headlines? Well, “Left, Right & Center” commentators Matt Miller, Robert Scheer and Tony Blankley (Arianna Huffington was away) have some ideas about what caused the nightmare on Wall Street and what the future holds.
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 AP photo / Richard Drew
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By Robert Scheer — Has the war on terrorism become the modern equivalent of the Roman Circus, drawing the people’s attention away from the failures of those who rule them? Corporate America is a shambles because deregulation, the mantra of our president and his party, has proved to be a license to steal.
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 AP photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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President Bush had been laying low over recent days, but it seems his inner circle considered it prudent to trot him out for a brief appearance at the White House. He surfaced on Thursday to speak vaguely about the snowballing economic crisis on Wall Street before disappearing once again.
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Whither Lehman Brothers? Et tu, Merrill Lynch? What’s going on on Wall Street? Jon Stewart breaks down the financial meltdown on Tuesday night’s edition of “The Daily Show”—complete with ‘80s monster movie allusions. Sweet!
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 listphile.com
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Here we go again: The Federal Reserve is bailing out another tanking financial institution—the insurance behemoth American International Group—by sinking $85 billion into AIG in return for a stake in the company. Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for a Wall Street investigation following this latest startling agreement between big government and big business.
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 AP photo / LM Otero
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By Bill Boyarsky — While it’s fashionable for the media and some of his own supporters to be mourning the demise of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, they may well be overlooking an important point—that the vaunted McCain-Palin ticket has peaked. What else but such blind optimism could be motivating the unflagging energy of thousands of Obama grass-roots workers?
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 Flickr / epicharmus
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President Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. attempted to head off mounting market woes and investor freak-outs at the pass on Monday as Wall Street suffered its worst losses since right after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
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On Sunday, The Washington Post ran an Op-Ed piece written by McCain campaign adviser Donald Luskin in which he argues that, despite “trouble spots in the economy,” recent comparisons between the present moment and the Great Depression are the product of “pessimists” and “politics.” Over to you, Alan Greenspan.
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By Eugene Robinson — It’s not surprising in the cutthroat world of Wall Street to see a big-time CEO such as Stanley O’Neal float out of the boardroom with a golden parachute. What is significant is that this grandson of a slave managed to become one of the “Masters of the Universe” in the first place.
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