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By David E. Sanger
$17.79
By Christopher Caldwell
$19.80
$17
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If you thought tea party politics were just for rabid wingnuts and certain Twitter-prone politicians, think again or else you may miss out on some hot stock market action before the November elections.
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Wikimedia Commons
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People close to the case are claiming that AIG executive Joseph Cassano will not face federal charges related to allegations that he misled investors over the company’s handling of mortgage-related securities prior to the economic crash and subsequent Wall Street bailout.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — It was the Perry Mason moment in the unraveling of what was left of Goldman Sachs’ reputation. Only in this case, it involved a grizzled former prosecutor, Sen. Carl Levin, rather than a genial defense attorney.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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Calling him “short, slight and looking as though he were on a break from prep school,” The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank devoted his entire column Wednesday to the “arrogance” of Goldman Sachs wunderkind Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre, as well he should have done.
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Step right up and you’ll see spectacles that will amaze from Tuesday’s face-off between senators and Goldman Sachs boss men, such as the awesome Fabrice Tourre denying “categorically” that he misled clients by selling them mysterious bundled financial entities tied to doomed mortgages.
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Flickr / The Truth About Credit Cards
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President Obama and his allies won’t have an easy time as they attempt to do some major renovations of our financial system, but according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, they at least have the support of the majority of Americans.
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AP / Alex Brandon
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President Obama spoke before a group of fat cats—or rather, “titans of industry,” as he called them—from Wall Street on Thursday at Cooper Union in New York City, the same site where he’d delivered his pre-bailout, pre-presidential speech on the economy two years ago, in an attempt ... (continued)
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AP / Andy Blenkush
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By Moshe Adler — Why should a poor borrower be held more responsible than a rich borrower for the default of another poor borrower?
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Flickr / laverrue
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Goldman Sachs has demonstrated a remarkable ability to keep pulling in the profits—and bestowing bonuses on company execs—regardless of the state of the global economy, and despite what the bank might have done to damage it in the first place. On Tuesday ... (continued)
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AP / Dennis Cook
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By Robert Scheer — There aren’t too many genuine heroes to come out of the banking disaster, but Armando Falcon is one of them—and had he been listened to, a significant part of the housing crisis could have been mitigated.
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AP / Mark Lennihan
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Recently disclosed internal documents and an audio recording regarding a 2008 securities standoff between Goldman Sachs and insurance giant AIG appear to be the smoking guns necessary to pinpoint Goldman’s culpability in the mortgage meltdown and the collapse of AIG.
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Flickr / eflon
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We all know the outcome now, but in the latter months of 2007 executives at AIG seemed to be only starting to catch wind of the problems that eventually led to the nationwide financial collapse the firm helped precipitate a year later. Were they just overly confident? Clueless? Or were they hiding the fact that they knew very well that the jig was up?
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foreclosurewearhouse.com
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Who knew the Treasury Department had such deep pockets? Well, besides all of Wall Street, we can put the beleaguered duo that is Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on the list. The Treasury has obligingly removed the $400 billion cap previously assigned to the funding designated to save the two mortgage firms.
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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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Flickr / respres
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Homeowners facing foreclosure could get help if Congress approves a “cram-down” measure, which would give bankruptcy judges the ability to alter mortgage terms. The House of Representatives is gearing up to vote on the amendment, but it’s not likely to be an easy victory by any stretch.
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Other market sectors are another story, and this story may also change in coming months, but let’s have some good news about the residential real estate market, shall we? Right: The Associated Press is reporting that home sales rose more than 10 percent in October from their September levels, largely due to tax incentives, and November may continue along this trend.
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serenitythruhaiku.wordpress.com
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Under the guidance of Rep. Barney Frank, the House Financial Services Committee made changes to a plan designed to increase government oversight of various financial markets, ideally to avoid a recurrence of last year’s economic catastrophe. It’ll mean more focus on certain types of businesses than others.
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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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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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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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orlandorealtyexperts.com
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As foreclosures continue to force Americans out of their homes, some advocacy organizations are getting creative, suggesting that homeowners refuse to leave their foreclosed houses and helping others move into vacated abodes—either openly or under the radar.
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In a bid to interact more directly with the public at large, the Obama administration once again turned to the Web, inviting Americans to submit questions for Thursday’s online “town hall” meeting. Here President Obama sets the stage with his opening remarks, discusses helping homeowners and considers whether marijuana should be legalized.
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listphile.com
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The tug of war continues between corporate financial giants and the federal government, and certain members of the former seem to have some trouble adjusting to their post-bailout status. AIG, for example, is still planning to reward its top 400 executives with a whopping $165 million in bonuses this weekend, even after the company was given more than $170 billion from taxpayers to stay afloat. Updated
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By Eugene Robinson — Obama must deal with a new presidential role that he did not seek but cannot avoid: managing big chunks of the private-sector economy.
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AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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He has his opponents in Congress, but President Barack Obama is stressing the need to settle the stimulus issue—and fast. On Monday, in his first major news conference since assuming office, Obama warned of economic troubles ahead and presented the stimulus package as a possible way out.
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Flickr / respres
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By Amy Goodman — Rep. Marcy Kaptur has a solution for beleaguered homeowners facing foreclosure: Dare Wall Street to produce the loan note that was bundled, securitized, sold and resold.
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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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Wikimedia Commons
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Want to know where the $350 billion banking bailout went and why it hasn’t done a bit of good? Read, and weep over, this little-noticed report from the congressional panel set up to monitor the Treasury Department’s distribution of our taxpayer funds.
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Flickr/respres
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We knew this news was bound to be bad, but we didn’t think it would be quite this grim: The number of American homeowners who faced foreclosure proceedings in 2008 passed the 2.3 million mark, an 81 percent increase over the previous year.
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By David Sirota — With the release of three new reports, there’s no debate anymore about who was correct and who wasn’t concerning the economic collapse and the Wall Street bailout. The studies prove that progressive critics were right and the Washington ideologues and the pundits were wrong.
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whatpricejusticeblog.com
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While it’s great that it has finally been acknowledged, the National Bureau of Economic Research’s announcement on Monday that the U.S. is officially in a recession is old news—even by the bureau’s own estimation. Updated
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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
READ MORE 
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Getting a grip on the economic catastrophe that rocked the country during the fall of 2008 is no easy feat, what with so many players, back-room deals, bills, upswings and meltdowns to consider. Updated
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foreclosurewearhouse.com
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Starting on Nov. 26, mortgage finance mega-firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will take a time out from foreclosures and evictions until Jan. 9—a welcome holiday break for struggling homeowners that hopefully will catch on among other corporate players in the mortgage market.
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Collage: Meutia Chaerani / Indradi Soemardjan and Shealah Craighead / White House
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“I will never apologize for changing a strategy or an approach if the facts change,” explained Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who has retreated from his original plan of buying up near-worthless mortgage securities with taxpayer funds. Instead, Paulson will continue to pump money into troubled banks in exchange for equity, a scheme that has proved more expeditious and popular.
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By William Pfaff — “What am I going to tell the public,” one French official asked, “when there are 3 million people marching in the streets of Paris? That ‘we all made mistakes’? That no one was really responsible?”
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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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Flickr / soggydan
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John McCain has laid out his plan for how he would help Americans recover from the recent shocks to the domestic and international markets. He took the action on Tuesday, a day later than he initially said he would and a day after Democratic presidential rival Barack Obama released his own economic plan—and McCain’s timing was not lost on the Obama campaign.
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Tuesday night marked the second debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, moderated by NBC’s Tom Brokaw at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn. While Brokaw struggled to stick to the script, the two candidates fielded questions about the current economic catastrophe and American foreign policy.
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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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By Eugene Robinson — We all owe a debt of thanks to the skeptics who refused to be steamrollered by the Bush administration’s $700-billion financial bailout plan until we at least had some understanding of what we were doing and why.
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AP photo / Lauren Victoria Burke
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Early Sunday morning brought word that the end of the drawn-out bailout negotiations between warring factions of the federal government might finally be at hand, although the House and Senate had not yet officially approved terms of the proposed plan. Updated
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wamu.com
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JPMorgan Chase added to its failed financial behemoth collection by gobbling up the deposits of Washington Mutual, which set a record for the biggest U.S. bank failure Thursday. According to the FDIC and Chase, bank customers have nothing to worry about.
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By Joe Conason — Before this is over, we will need a special prosecutor with an ample budget to find, prosecute and imprison the criminals responsible for this disaster and ultimately deter such criminals in the future.
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AP photo / J. Scott Applewhite
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By Robert Scheer — Does it really matter which party is in charge when it comes to bailing out the Wall Street hustlers whose shenanigans have bankrupted so many ordinary folks? Not if the Democrats roll over and cede power to the former head of Goldman Sachs, the investment bank at the center of our economic meltdown.
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AP photo / Madalyn Ruggiero
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By Bill Boyarsky — In Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, the fact that he is African-American has seemed to be an obstacle that could be overcome with a good campaign, a few breaks and the issues turning his way. That’s what is happening now.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Unless something very strange happens, Congress will pass a massive bailout of the financial system by the end of this week simply because every other option is worse. But the content of the bailout package matters enormously.
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By Eugene Robinson — Let’s be clear about why we’re facing a crisis that could pull down the global financial system. The irresponsibility of individuals who bought houses they couldn’t quite afford pales in comparison to the irresponsibility of the financial wizards who built on those shaky mortgages a towering edifice of irrational faith.
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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It seems that some key officials involved in the negotiations with the Bush administration over the terms of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s $700-billion bailout proposal for Wall Street aren’t about to make a deal unless it includes specific plans for congressional oversight and help for homeowners on the brink of foreclosure.
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