bailouts

The private prison industry is on the march. In recent months the industry moved to take over 24 state prisons in southern Florida and buy five prisons in Ohio. Now it’s making moves in Michigan.

But the industry doesn’t always win. Resistance isn’t futile. more »

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Financial industry insiders are grousing about a big downturn in annual bonuses. They should be thanking the rest of us — bombshell new research shows — for their continuing awesome good tidings.

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We had bailouts and bonuses for Wall Street but letdowns and layoffs for Main Street. We had a deficit commission but no jobs commission. We have tax cuts for the rich and budget cuts for the rest of We, the People. And this week the President is having a "summit" with the heads of giant corporations. more »

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President Barack Obama and Congressional Republicans are ready to mortgage the American economy to billionaires in exchange for a few months of unemployment benefits. This deal is easily the gravest economic outrage of the Obama presidency to date, and signals that other political assaults on the economy are ahead. more »

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The Republican Party's newfound political assault on Ben Bernanke is a grim reminder of the actual conservative economic agenda for the next two years. The midterm elections taught Republicans a destructive lesson: With Democrats in power, the worse the economy gets, the better Republicans do at the voting booth. more »

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GOP candidates are making a point of running against "bailouts" this year. Yet even as they rail about rescuing big banks, they're working on a plan that would slip those same banks an estimated $90 billion in taxpayer money ... and that's just in the first ten years.

"Fiscal conservatism," anyone?

It was always hypocritical to slam a bailout that they and their party initiated. But it turns out they were just warming up. Now they're trying to pull a fast one on the American public, tapping Tea Party rage about big government spending even as they prepare to slip the big bankers some big bucks. They're planning to siphon off $90 billion meant for America's college students and their families and give it to Wall Street.

Any Tea Partier who votes for these guys is being played for a sucker. more »

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Over at bloggingheads, my CAF colleague Bill Scher discusses the new international banking standards with Conn Carroll, a conservative blogger for The Heritage Foundation. Carroll actually agrees with a lot of what I have to say about Basel III, but I he draws conclusions from my post that overemphasize the role of regulation and ignore the insane lobbying and outright fraud that Wall Street deployed to create a crisis.

The fact that Carroll and I can agree on this stuff (to an extent) shouldn't come as a terrible shock—Wall Street reform is about the basic functioning of the economy—it's not an issue that needs to ignite ideological conflict. Here are his key comments:

"I like the acknowledgement that the problem of this last financial crisis had to do with a problem of regulation."

Nothing wrong there. You'd have to be insane to believe that financial regulations—or the regulators who implemented them—were up to snuff. But here's where I part ways with Carroll:

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3:45

Clearly the best FCIC hearing to date. Tough questions all around. Everybody comes out of it looking bad, bankers and regulators alike, as they should.

***********************

3:30 more »

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What is the penalty for bankers who tell $40 billion lies? Somewhere between nothing and a rounding-error on your bonus. more »

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When the nation's most prestigious investment banks found themselves on the verge of total annihilation in the fall of 2008, the most radical and effective government response was not the infamous $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. more »

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