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By Susan Jacoby
$16.32
$23
$22
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A look at the day’s political happenings, including a bipartisan agreement reached on immigration reform and Obama and Clinton give a joint interview on “60 Minutes.”
Posted on Jan 28, 2013
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Flickr / epicharmus
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By Robert Reich — TARP—the infamous Troubled Assets Relief Program that bailed out Wall Street in 2008—is over. The Treasury Department announced it will be completing the sale of the remaining shares it owns of the banks and of General Motors. But in reality it’s not over.
Posted on Jan 8, 2013
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AP/Scott Applewhite
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In late 2008, Neil Barofsky was appointed the Treasury Department’s investigator of the bank bailouts. In the time since, he has suffered dismissal and deprecation from his colleagues and the corporations they’re supposed to regulate.
Posted on Aug 4, 2012
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jpellgen
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The financial meltdown and subsequent bailout have dampened Americans’ faith in government and stirred widespread outrage. Neil Barofsky, who once served as special inspector general in charge of oversight of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, says that anger may point the way toward reform.
Posted on Jul 23, 2012
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DonkeyHotey (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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By Ellen Brown, Web of Debt —
JPMorgan Chase is the biggest campaign donor to many of the members of the Senate Banking Committee who were charged with investigating the bank’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, in mid June.
Posted on Jun 21, 2012
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U.S. Treasury
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Just as Mitt Romney has locked up the Republican nomination on a boast of fiscal conservatism, President Obama’s Treasury Department has said it expects to turn a tidy $2 billion profit from TARP and other extraordinary measures taken to bail out the financial industry.
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AP / Alex Brandon
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By Robert Scheer — How I wish that Ben Bernanke would get caught emailing photos of his underwear-clad groin. Otherwise we don’t stand a chance of reversing this administration’s economic policy, which is shaping up to be every bit as disastrous as that of its predecessor.
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imdb.com
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By Robert Scheer — It is not true, as a Wall Street Journal reviewer claimed, that the HBO movie version of Andrew Sorkin’s book “Too Big to Fail” was “Too Boring to Watch.” On the contrary, the problem with the film, as with the richly anecdotal book, is that it is all too effectively misleading.
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Wikimedia Commons / Efloch
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Does the name Neel Kashkari ring a bell? Think way back to the year 2008, when the word bailout was just entering the vernacular in relation to Wall Street, not prison, and when Henry Paulson was still in charge of the Treasury Department.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — In the ever-so-smug company of the rich and powerful, it is a given that there is never to be any expression of remorse or other acknowledgement of the pain they have inflicted on the lesser mortals they so cavalierly plunder.
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Flickr / Michael Gray (CC-BY-SA)
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Bank of America has reported its second straight quarterly loss, $1.2 billion for the last three months of 2010 after a devaluation of its mortgage business.
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By Joe Conason — The disaffection and demoralization of Democrats have created a dangerous political vacuum that is being filled with misleading data, urban legends and outright lies.
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Wikimedia Commons / Scrumshus
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After a long struggle, partly caused by pre-midterm-election power jostling in Congress, the Senate passed a bill designed to give small businesses a leg up in a 61-38 vote on Thursday. The House is also expected to approve the bill, which some GOP types ... (continued)
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Bill Boyarsky — Broadway and Central Avenue in the Watts area of South Los Angeles are lined with dozens of small, marginal businesses, but hardly any banks. In a capitalist economy, these are streets without capital, losers in the race to the top.
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Wikimedia Commons
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Rep. Maxine Waters may be in deep ... trouble if she’s found guilty of the trio of ethics charges that a House committee hit her with Monday. The congresswoman apparently plans to contest the violations ... (continued)
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Sticks and stones and all that: U.S. bankers are probably glad today that, as the childhood rhyme claims, “words can never hurt me,” since the Obama administration’s so-called pay czar has decided to criticize them for paying out $1.6 billion in extra payments to top execs after they received federal bailout funds—but not seek any punishment.
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AP / Mark Lennihan
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By Robert Scheer — The story of the financial debacle will end the way it began, with the super-hustlers from Goldman Sachs at the center of the action and profiting wildly. Never in U.S. history has one company wielded such destructive power over our political economy, irrespective of whether a Republican or a Democrat happened to be president.
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AP / Alex Brandon
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By Robert Scheer — The state of the union is just miserable, no matter how President Obama sugarcoats it. He will claim that progress has been made in stabilizing the markets, increasing national security and advancing toward meaningful health care reform, but he will be wrong on all three counts.
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bbc.co.uk
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In case you hadn’t noticed, not a heck of a lot has changed on Wall Street in the last year, despite various banking behemoths’ successful pleas for federal aid to float them out of the recession they were instrumental in creating. Well, that’s about to change—or so President Barack Obama says, at least.
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AP / Mark Lennihan
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He’s not the only one saying this, but considering his background, Robert Reich is a pretty significant voice pointing out how, over a year since things went seriously south on Wall Street, “almost nothing has been done to prevent all hell from breaking loose again.”
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AP / Susan Walsh
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On Monday at the White House, President Barack Obama reminded a group of big banking honchos (or “fat cats,” as he called them Sunday) about last year’s bailout and advised them to get busy helping the taxpayers who helped with their recovery. Well, good luck with that one.
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Flickr / antiparticle
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Goldman Sachs has had a record year in terms of employee earnings—The Wall Street Journal says Goldman’s 31,000 worker bees brought in an average of more than $700,000 each in 2009—and that would be better news for the firm if it hadn’t been on the receiving end of major federal funding from last year’s bailout.
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Wikimedia Commons / Presidencia de la Nación Argentina
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The Troubled Asset Relief Program, otherwise known as TARP, was scheduled to expire at the end of this year, but Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told Congress on Wednesday that it’ll stick around until October 2010, partly as a precautionary measure in case of economic emergency and partly to help struggling homeowners, banks and small businesses.
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speaker.gov
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The president is so desperate for ways to fight unemployment he issued a call Thursday for “fresh perspectives and new ideas.” Well, Nancy Pelosi has some. The House speaker wants to spend some of that hot, hot TARP money on job creation. (continued)
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Bank of America has been cleared by the U.S. government to repay the $45 billion in TARP funds it received last year at the height of the banking crisis, and BofA may be preparing to do so before 2009 comes to a close. That said, it’s not a foregone conclusion that the transaction will take place this month, even though the company has some built-in motivation to quickly make good on its payback promise.
Posted on Dec 2, 2009
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At long last, it seems that members of Congress, of left- and right-leaning persuasions alike, are harboring serious doubts about a couple of key players on President Barack Obama’s economic task force. The right-leaning Tony Blankley thinks that this signals the cyclical, and helpful, breakdown of hyper-partisanship on Capitol Hill. Meanwhile, Robert Scheer thinks Sarah Palin is still scary.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By David Sirota — The former financial executives inside the Obama administration have labeled their bill the “Financial Stability Improvement Act,” but it’s more like the 9/11 of bailouts.
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about.com
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The government-run TARP program is preparing to shift its focus from large banks—such as Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America—to smaller banks, noting that small businesses are still struggling to get access to credit.
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blogspot.com
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In a move to quell public outrage, President Obama has ordered the government’s “pay czar” to cut by 90 percent the multimillion-dollar salaries that executives of seven bank and auto companies are receiving, citing the fact that these firms are entirely dependent on U.S. taxpayer money for financial survival.
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AP / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — Who are these people? I am not referring to the pathetic parents of “Balloon Boy,” whose fake drama I have been unable to escape while on the treadmill this week, thanks to my gym’s insistence on tuning its flat-screen TVs to Wolf Blitzer’s nonstop self-parody.
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0-60mag.com
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If you thought last year’s federal budget deficit was pretty big, you were right—and it’s three times as big now! Thanks to the magic of the recession, as well as the government’s attempts to rescue various sectors of the economy (and throw money at others, or so it appeared), the deficit for the 12 months ending last month was a whopping $1.42 trillion.
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pagetutor.com
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By Matt Bivens, TomDispatch —
In the 20th century, smallpox killed more people than all of that bloody century’s wars combined. It cost $300 million to eradicate the disease. What might have been achieved with the $4 trillion we gave Wall Street?
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Flickr / respres
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John Dunbar of the Center for Public Integrity has analyzed the Obama administration’s home loan modification program, which aims to keep troubled borrowers in their homes, and finds it “highly problematic.”
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Flickr / respres
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John Dunbar of the Center for Public Integrity has analyzed the Obama administration’s home loan modification program, which aims to keep troubled borrowers in their homes, and finds it “highly problematic.”
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taisha.org
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Fresh off the bailout, Goldman Sachs raked in $3.44 billion in net profit this quarter, beating analysts’ already high expectations, and the firm’s success will pay off for employees in the form of generous bonuses. Not surprisingly, pro-Goldman types think this is all good news.
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Flickr / antiparticle
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Goldman Sachs is expected to announce a windfall quarter, thanks no doubt to billions in bailout money, but many people at the firm aren’t puffing their chests out. According to the Financial Times, Goldman executives dumped close to $700 million in stock between September 2008 and April 2009—after taxpayers came to the rescue.
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AP photo / Brennan Linsley, pool
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By Robert Scheer — The Bush-Obama strategy of throwing trillions at the banks to solve the mortgage crisis is a huge bust. The financial moguls, while tickled pink to have $1.25 trillion in toxic assets covered by the feds, along with hundreds of billions in direct handouts, are not using that money to turn around the free fall in housing foreclosures.
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This week’s episode of “Left, Right & Center” takes a look at the doings in Iran and U.S. involvement there, with Truthdig Editor Robert Scheer recalling his interview of a CIA agent who said he organized the 1953 coup in that country. Other topics include two hot issues on the domestic side—U.S. regulatory proposals and health care.
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This week on “Left, Right and Center” the gang tackles three big questions: What do today’s Iranian elections mean in the polarized theocracy? What’s going on in the banking world and with the alleged TARP paybacks? And finally, given the partisan divide, will public health care ever become a viable option in the U.S.? Tune in to find out.
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AP photo / J. David Ake
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By Robert Scheer — You probably don’t know much about Sheila Bair, but she is looking out for you, and that is why the big guys on Wall Street and their allies in the Obama administration are out to get her.
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Flickr / The TruthAbout...
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Some of the country’s major banks are prepared to pay back money they borrowed under the TARP program, but don’t get too excited. The initial repayment is expected to be a meager $50 billion, which Timothy Geithner wants to inject right back into other troubled banks.
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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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NASA / U.S. Treasury
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President Obama has said he doesn’t want public money going into a “black hole,” but his administration’s bank bailout looks more and more like an abyss of cosmic proportions. Not only are the bailed-out banks lending less than before, the Treasury Department appears to be engaging in creative math to obscure the gravity of the situation.
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Flickr / stan
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Like an abused spouse, America continues to stand by the banks, hoping they’ll change their ways. TARP funds were supposed to trickle down to the average taxpayer, but Congress is now investigating complaints that bailed-out banks such as Bank of America and Citigroup are jacking up interest rates and engaging in predatory lending.
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By David Sirota — In the last decade, the financial industry’s $5 billion investment in campaign contributions and lobbyists resulted in deregulation and boatloads of free money. By Bloomberg News’ account, $12.8 trillion worth of taxpayer loans, grants and guarantees—all to Wall Street.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The president’s plan to bail out the banks reveals a deference to the existing financial system that puts him at odds with Nobel Prize-winning economists Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont who is independent in spirit as well as party label, has placed a hold on President Obama’s nomination of Gary Gensler to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Sounds like a minor issue to get worked up about, but I see this appointment as further evidence that the president has entrusted his economic policy to the wrong people.
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Flickr / epicharmus
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What a deal! Timothy Geithner’s new plan to save the banks from themselves commits American taxpayers to a massive purchase of the toxic assets that the banks had originally insisted were risk-free investments. Of course, Wall Street loved the news. Update
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Marching in Chicago: Resisting Rahm Emanuel’s Neoliberal Savagery
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