Somehow, this will still turn out to be the fault of the Democrats:
WASHINGTON – The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to [...]
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Isn’t that sweet? How many of you are getting bonuses this year?
Nov. 26 (Bloomberg) — American International Group Inc., the insurer that said yesterday it scrapped bonuses for top executives after a U.S. bailout, will still pay 130 managers “cash awards” to stay with the firm, including $3 million to retirement services chief Jay [...]
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Michael Pollan was Bill Moyers’ guest tonight in an excellent and provocative piece on how federal agriculture policies supporting things like high fructose corn syrup actually cause ill health in the American consumer. Really interesting, go watch it online.
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Your tax dollars at work. (Plus, you know, it’s the Mets!)
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Krugman points out the Citigroup bailout is “a lousy deal for the taxpayers, no accountability for management, and just to make things perfect, quite possibly inadequate, so that Citi will be back for more. Amazing how much damage the lame ducks can do in the time remaining.”
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But then, some workers are worthier than others:
CounterPunch editor Alexander Cockburn confesses (Nation, 11/19/08) to being moved to violent thoughts “while listening to the McLaughlin Group, all of whom presumably haul home at least $200,000 a year, as they deplored the unconscionable wages of line workers in Detroit”:
The same urge flares [...]
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Nouriel Roubini:
Nov 23: Federal government agreed to rescue Citigroup by helping to absorb potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in losses on toxic assets on its balance sheet and injecting fresh capital into the troubled financial giant.
# Details: Citigroup and the government have identified about $306 billion in troubled assets. Citigroup will absorb first [...]
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I’m listening to some banking “expert” on my teevee saying what a great idea it is to bail out Citigroup because, you know, their Wachovia merger didn’t go through and switches seamlessly to attacking the auto industry CEOs for flying to D.C. in their private jets and “not having a plan for what they’re going [...]
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Massive pooper-scooping effort for more Masters of the Universe. Of course, the fact that Obama advisor Robert Rubin is also a Citigroup director has nothing to do with this:
Federal regulators approved a radical plan to stabilize Citigroup in an arrangement in which the government could soak up billions of dollars in losses at the struggling [...]
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We have billions of dollars to help banks but not the people left unemployed by their recklessness:
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — They have little in common: Ron Jones, 52, short and strong, a union carpenter with decades of work experience; and Jerome Grant, 20, tall and thin, a Jamaican immigrant with a degree in culinary arts. [...]
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Ah yes, the old “considerations will be made” routine:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President-elect Barack Obama may consider delaying an election promise - to roll back tax cuts on high-income Americans - as part of his economic recovery strategy, a senior aide and an adviser said on Sunday.
David Axelrod, one of Obama’s closest confidants chosen to be [...]
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That BushCo banking “regulators” were more like “suggesters”?
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Our banking system’s broken. Bill Greider:
Here is the ugly, unofficial truth that neither Wall Street nor the government will acknowledge: the pinnacle of the US financial system is broke — with perhaps $2 trillion in rotten financial assets on the books. Nobody knows, exactly. The bankers won’t say, and regulators won’t ask, or at least [...]
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You know that credit card companies have been LEGALLY jacking up your interest rates for no good reason, right?
You need to let the Senate know you want them to support the reforms already passed by the House.
Click here.
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David Sirota:
Glenn Greenwald long ago taught us why we should always look skeptically at the fact-free prognostications of the Washington Post’s Steve Pearlstein. That said, this line in Pearlstein’s column today caught my eye today (h/t lutton):
“The haggling now [about the automaker bailout] is over the appropriate mechanism. My guess is that the whole thing [...]
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Little Ricky Santorum urges the U.S. to do something about “national security” menace Hugo Chavez.
Part of his solution? Declare Venezuela a sponsor of terrorism. He notes with glee:
The Venezuelan economy is already reeling, with 50 percent inflation and shortages of food. Putting the country on the terror list would effectively shut down oil production [...]
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Clap your hands!
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Really, he had the balls to say that - without laughing and saying “just kidding” afterward:
DETROIT — The chief executive of a major U.S. bank that received $25 billion from the government’s financial bailout package said Tuesday that federal aid shouldn’t be dispensed to the ailing Detroit Three automakers — unless they become the Detroit [...]
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From Democracy Now!
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Via David Sirota:
The nation indeed may be facing a financial crisis, with large institutions failing in the wake of multibillion debts, but most bank-lending to business customers actually has been on the rise.
The latest government numbers, through mid-October, show bank commercial and industrial loans up, bank commercial real estate loans rising and interbank loans climbing. [...]
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Today I had lunch with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while, and he asked me what economists and bloggers were saying about the bailout. I said it was commonly perceived as a clusterfuck - that they were treating a solvency problem as a liquidity problem, and the only way to get to the [...]
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It’s not really analogous, I know. But still, the idea that insurance companies are buying thrifts in order to be eligible for the bailout reminds me of people who run up their credit cards because they know they’re going to declare bankruptcy.
It’s unseemly. Of course, corporate statism passed “unseemly” a long time ago.
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It’s a lot more expensive and complicated to file for bankruptcy now (thanks, Republicans and their Democratic enablers!) and some experts believe it’s making the economic crisis even worse. In fact, many consumers are under the mistaken impression they can no longer file:
Bankruptcy lawyers report that they have been having more consultations with middle-class families [...]
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Robert Reich:
This is not the Great Depression of the 1930s, but nor is it turning out to be merely a bad recession of the kind we’ve experienced periodically over the last half century. Call it a Mini Depression. The employment report last Friday shows job losses accelerating, along with the number of Americans working part [...]
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Link:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – George Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management, testified at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on Thursday. Highlights:
* Said “a deep recession is now inevitable and the possibility of a depression cannot be ruled out.”
* Said hedge funds were an integral part of the financial market bubble which now has [...]
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From Pro Publica:
The U.S. Treasury still hasn’t un-redacted its contracts with accounting firms.In October, we noted that the U.S. Treasury Department had blacked out key details of contracts it awarded as part of its $700 billion taxpayer-funded bailout plan.
Treasury officials said it would be only a matter of weeks before they shared the information. [...]
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Still no oversight!
“Trust me.”
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Oh look, the very important and knowledgeable secretary of the Treasury seems to be coming around to the argument posed by Dirty F*cking Hippies for the past several months:
In detailing the next phase of Treasury’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, Mr. Paulson indicated the government would continue flooding financial institutions with cash, but [...]
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Only a relative handful will get help, huh?
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration on Tuesday announced another plan to modify what it thinks will be hundreds of thousands of distressed mortgages held or backed by mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
But the plan, more than 15 months into a deep nationwide housing slump, [...]
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The next time someone says we can trust the market to regulate itself, I may throw a cream pie in his or her face:
Goldman, Sachs & Co. urged some of its big clients to place investment bets against California bonds this year despite having collected millions of dollars in fees to help the state sell [...]
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