bank bailout

To convey the significance of the Occupy Wall Street movement, NBC News anchor Brian Williams this week quoted the 1960s Buffalo Springfield song, For What It’s Worth:

“There is something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear.”

more »

More »»

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is promising to unleash a cache of secret documents from the hard drive of a U.S. megabank executive. In 2009, he told Computer World that the bank was Bank of America (BofA). more »

More »»

Mike Stark has posted a provocative on-the-street interview with Barney Frank about the recently released Fed data. Frank offers what is now a standard defense of the Fed's bailout operations: Without them, the economy would have collapsed, so critics should just quit whining. more »

More »»

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 »

More »»

Economic policy has faced grave challenges over the past two years, hamstrung by obstructionist Republicans in the U.S. Senate and Wall Street-friendly advisers in the Obama administration. With the Republican Party now in control of the House, it seems certain that any major action to create jobs will face tremendous obstacles. This is a global calamity. more »

More »»

It's been pretty well-documented that the ultimate fate of Wall Street reform will depend on a series of highly technical proceedings at federal regulatory agencies. If regulators adopt tough new rules, the financial overhaul could succeed well beyond the expectations of optimistic reformers. more »

More »»

Remember 2003, when so many Americans hated France for refusing to participate in the Iraq invasion? The airwaves were filled with insults about "effete" and "cowardly" Frenchmen, the phrase "cheese eating surrender monkeys" was on lips across the nation, and rich patriots were boycotting Rhône wine in the spirit of national sacrifice. Well, munch on a Freedom Fry and ponder this: Finally, after one stunning revelation of big bank lawlessness after another, a banker is going to jail... in France.

That's a bit of a national embarrassment, n'est-ce pas?

Jerome Kerviel was sentenced today to five years in prison (with two years suspended), and was ordered to pay the equivalent of $6.7 billion US in damages. There are a number of questions about Kerviel's case, although the most puzzling one for American banker sensibilities might be the fact that he never profited personally from his massive trades. That part of Kerviel's psychology is incomprehensible to the Wall Street mind: He made his firm billions of dollars, yet earned less than $200,000 US per year for his efforts. A true American shark would have nothing but contempt for a sucker like that. more »

More »»

Today’s absurd William Cohan column actually argues that we don’t need consumer protections in banking—nevermind the subprime explosion, the $8 trillion dollar housing bubble or the 1.2 million foreclosures expected this year. more »

More »»

A full 90 members of Congress who voted to bailout Wall Street in 2008 failed to support financial reform reining in the banks that drove our economy off a cliff. more »

More »»

I'll have plenty to say about the escalating foreclosure fraud scandal later this week. For now: This is a big, big deal. It isn't a clerical error, it's an aggressive attempt to slap borrowers with thousands of dollars in illegal fees for the luxury of being foreclosed on. more »

More »»