Stressed Clout
The Wall Street Journal (pay site) posted a story on its web site last Friday, May 8, after the markets closed. The headline was “Banks Won Concessions on Tests,” with the subhed, “Fed Cut Billions Off...
View ArticleOver-The-Counter Attack
Yesterday, just about 15 years after the General Accounting Office warned it was necessary, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner sent a letter to regulators expressing President Obama’s interest in...
View ArticleOn the House
Edmund L. Andrews is living mortgage-free, and he’s written a book about it. This is not as tasty as it first sounds. He has had panic attacks. He feels really bad about it. He annoyed the shit out of...
View ArticleNYT spotlights the derivatives lobby
The New York Times posted a long and important story by Gretchen Morgenson and Don Van Natta yesterday discussing the derivative industry’s sneaky lobbying campaign to prevent effective regulation of...
View ArticleFDIC v. Citi?
The Wall Street Journal’s Damian Paletta, citing “people familiar with the matter,” writes of a showdown between FDIC Chief Sheila Bair and CitiGroup CEO Vikram Pandit. Basically, if the story is to be...
View ArticleIt’s The Acronymy, Stupid: $13.9 Trillion
Our friends at Calculated Risk have posted an FDIC chart detailing all the alphabet-soup programs and all the money pledged to prop up the financial Ponzi scheme. The total is just shy of $14 trillion....
View ArticleHow Lies=Bonuses
So, in a week where Goldman Sachs reported mega billions in quarterly “earnings” and even CitiGroup squeezed out $4 billion, I have to direct your attention to the Columbia Journalism Review’s “The...
View ArticleSpeed Shills
The New York Times has front page expose today on “the hot new thing on Wall Street,” a powerful, computerized speed advantage that reaps billions for the select few: It is called high-frequency...
View ArticleTaylor Bean, TARP, the FDIC and You
Strange doings over the last few days in Central Florida have put about 10,000 Maryland homeowners in doubt about where to send their mortgage checks. But the real trouble is much bigger than that....
View ArticleWhere’s Your Money?
Good news today as Bloomberg News won its federal lawsuit to find out which giant corporations the Federal Reserve lavished big money on, and how much. It’s pretty outrageous that it took a nine-month...
View ArticleCitiGroup Says Goodbye to Its $100 Million Man
The New York Times says CitiGroup is selling its secretive oil-trading arm, Phibro, to Occidental Petroleum, apparently to avoid bad publicity. Still no one’s questioning the idea that the head guy in...
View ArticleMore Pay on Wall Street
The Wall Street Journal crunched some numbers and declared that, even though 10 percent of U.S. citizens are out of work while most of the rest are taking pay cuts, the Gilliganesque bunglers in the...
View ArticleGreenspan Changes His Mind
Alan Greenspan has changed his mind, proving finally that he has one. As Bloomberg reports, Greenspan told the influential crowd at the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday that the too-big-to-fail...
View ArticleHappy (belated) Gramm Leach Bliley Day
Yesterday (Nov. 12) was the 10th anniversary of the signing ceremony for the Gramm Leach Bliley Act. Though hailed at the time as a great breakthrough in financial regulatory reform—headlines predicted...
View ArticleDubai-ous Deals
This makes total sense. Right? The WSJ estimates CitiGroup’s exposure to Dubai World’s defaulted $80 billion (est.) debt at $1.9 billion. The beauty part is Andrew Sorkin’s reminder (in the NYT) that...
View ArticleHAFA Loaf
The housing crisis seems to be entering a new phase, with government programs that had been designed to try to keep people in their homes now being subtly shifted into a program meant to ease them out....
View ArticleTBTF Administrator: “There Is No Such Thing as TBTF”
Somewhere, Rene Magritte is smiling (from the WSJ): Herbert Allison, who oversees the Treasury’s $700 billion financial rescue plan, disagreed with members of a congressional oversight panel that some...
View ArticleFraud at the Bottom
Go with the fraud and make big bux or fight & get fired, earning the right to battle for your job back in court for five or six years, with a less-than-10-percent shot at winning. The post Fraud at...
View ArticleLoophole Nation
Without a loophole to grab hold of, every entrepreneur is threatened.The post Loophole Nation appeared first on City Paper Blogs.
View ArticleFinancial Reform Bill is Done
As expected, the bill contains no curb on too-big-to-fail institutions.The post Financial Reform Bill is Done appeared first on City Paper Blogs.
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