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Deal made to recover bailout Firms exempted from rule when U.S. sells its stake

Or did they? It sure sounds that way.... First, the Government of Abu Dhabi and the UAE Central Bank have agreed to provide important support. Specifically, the Government of Abu Dhabi has agreed to fund $10 billion to the Dubai Financial Support Fund that will be used to satisfy a series of upcoming obligations on Dubai World. You'll bail out the immediate maturing bond (you can call it a "sukuk" if you want; I call it a dodge to "comply" through fraudulent means a claimed absolute ban on the charging of interest, but then again, I tend to view anyone...

President Obama is calling on the financial industry to help dig the economy out of the pit the White House says it helped create, as the president and bank executives headed into a potentially tense meeting Monday morning. President Obama is calling on the financial industry to help dig the economy out of the pit the White House says it helped create, as the president and bank executives headed into a potentially tense meeting Monday morning. The president set the tone for the meeting in an interview broadcast the night before in which he called Wall Street bankers "fat cats"...

The ongoing state budget stalemate will temporarily keep millions of dollars out of the pockets of Ohio taxpayers. No budget deal means state income-tax booklets can't be printed. Not printing and distributing the forms means that Ohioans filing by paper won't be able to get the refunds due them until weeks later than normal. Even if a budget deal is hatched this week, Ohioans probably won't see new state tax forms until February. Last year, 51,770 individuals filed paper returns in January, and 47,113 of them sought a refund. Those refunds totaled an estimated $8.2 million to $9.4 million.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. played a bigger role than has been publicly disclosed in fueling the mortgage bets that nearly felled American Insurance Group Inc. Goldman was one of 16 banks paid off when the U.S. government last year spent billions closing out soured trades that AIG made with the financial firms. A Wall Street Journal analysis of AIG's trades, which were on pools of mortgage debt, shows that Goldman was a key player in many of them, even the ones involving other banks. Goldman originated or bought protection from AIG on about $33 billion of the $80 billion of...

Wall Street Titan's Role Shown in Journal Analysis; Firm Says Problems Hidden Goldman Sachs Group Inc. played a bigger role than has been publicly disclosed in fueling the mortgage bets that nearly felled American Insurance Group Inc. Goldman was one of 16 banks paid off when the U.S. government last year spent billions closing out soured trades that AIG made with the financial firms. A Wall Street Journal analysis of AIG's trades, which were on pools of mortgage debt, shows that Goldman was a key player in many of them, even the ones involving other banks. Goldman originated or bought...

The Obama administration's pay czar is limiting the cash compensation for executives at companies that received the largest taxpayer bailouts to $500,000. The 25th through the 100th top earners at Citigroup, GMAC, American International Group and General Motors also must take more than half their compensation in stock, and at least half must be delayed for three or more years, said Kenneth Feinberg, the Treasury Department's Special Master for Executive Compensation.

This week, the administration has been trumpeting [1] the news that the $700 billion TARP [2] is likely to ultimately cost much less than early estimates. That’s true, but far from the whole story. The government’s best estimate, released Wednesday [3], is that the bailouts of AIG and the auto companies will ultimately cost taxpayers about $61 billion. It also forecast that other parts of the TARP will end up making taxpayers money. Put it all together, and the final estimated loss from the bailout’s first full year (thru September 2009) is about $41.6 billion. (See our table below.)simple-tab.table{border:thin...

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans." Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired...

Seventy-one percent (71%) of voters nationwide say they’re at least somewhat angry about the current policies of the federal government. That figure includes 46% who are Very Angry. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 27% are not angry about the government's policies, including 10% who are Not at All Angry........ The data suggests that the level of anger is growing. The 71% who are angry at federal government policies today is up five percentage points since September. Even more stunning, the 46% who are Very Angry is up 10 percentage points from September.

In a London preview of Wall Street's bonus nightmare, more than 1,000 investment bankers have quit Royal Bank of Scotland to work at rivals due to curbs on their paychecks, according to people familiar with the situation. Wall Street banks fear top talent would flee en masse for greener pastures if Uncle Sam's pay czar, Ken Feinberg, and Congress try to put more ceilings on bonuses and pay at financial firms. In the UK, the rules are modeled after US actions to curb pay at firms bailed out by the government.RBS will soon be about 84-percent owned by the British...

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Wednesday moved to extend the government's $700 billion bailout fund into October 2010 and pledged to deploy no more than $550 billion of it. Geithner, in letters to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, said the extension of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) until Oct 3, 2010, would allow the Obama administration to use bailout funds to fight home foreclosures and boost small business lending.

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- House and Senate leaders proposed a compromise plan Tuesday to give shuttered General Motors and Chrysler dealers an appeals process to keep their showrooms open. Congressional aides said a broad $1.1 trillion spending bill would include language providing 789 Chrysler dealers closed in June and more than 1,350 GM dealers expected to be shut down next year an improved binding arbitration process to challenge the automakers' decisions. General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC said last week they would reconsider decisions to close the dealers as part of a compromise meant to set aside action by Congress...

"It's like a dream," Kashkari says, his work boots crunching pine cones. "Sometimes I think: Was it real?" It all began as it ended, abruptly. Kashkari was a 35-year-old business school graduate from a suburb of Akron, Ohio, who had gone to Washington in 2006 to learn how government worked. Then came the recession, and through a freakish set of circumstances, mixing pluck, cataclysm and luck, he was appointed by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson as the federal bailout chief. Suddenly, he was in charge of $700 billion. Congress savaged him. Wall Street Journal editorials doubted him. His home-town buddies urged...

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

If you haven't read Matt Taibbi's recent Rolling Stone piece on Goldman Sachs, make sure to get your hands on it ASAP. It's a must read on how Goldman Sachs and the U.S. government work hand in glove to produce giant investment bubbles... bubbles that allow Goldman to work over investors for hundreds of billions of dollars. We don't think you can lay all the blame for the housing bubble and the tech bubble at Goldman's feet... but we do find it suspicious that a ton of high level government posts are staffed by Goldman employees. It's close to a...

DETROIT -- Chrysler Group's Olivier Francois, the president-CEO of the Chrysler vehicle brand, has tapped Armando Testa, his ad agency for Italian Lancia, to refashion a Lancia commercial for the U.S. market. Hiring an Italian agency for the work may not sit well with American taxpayers, who bailed out the ailing Chrysler earlier this year with billions of dollars in loans. And all of the several hundreds of staffers of Chrysler Group's longtime ad agency, BBDO Detroit, will be out of work at the end of January when the contract expires. The 30-second commercial for the sleek Chrysler 300 sedan...

The push to provide newspapers a government bailout to save “independent” media got another boost from a rather likely source yesterday. As Danny Glover reports for Accuracy in Media, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) spoke at an FTC seminar on the crisis in media markets, at which other speakers insisted that government has routinely intervened in media, even newspapers, and that opposition to it somehow violates the American tradition. But first, Waxman said, newspapers had to ask Congress for a handout: Rep. Henry Waxman trekked from Capitol Hill to Federal Trade Commission headquarters today to deliver a message to journalists and...

Follow the bouncing ball: TARP, the trillion-dollar-plus banking bailout, has morphed from a toxic assets purchase plan to a capital injection plan, back to a toxic assets purchase plan, to a life insurance company bailout, to an auto supplier bailout. I’m sure I forgot more. Well, now the Democrats want to use it to bail out state governments and convert unused TARP bucks into…a government union slush fund.

(snip) Don Imus and the Arizona Republican were talking Friday morning about the February stimulus vote when McCain, who kept his famous temper at bay during the '08 campaign, went Howard Beale. Imus: Did you support that bill? McCain: Hell no. Imus: I don't think you have to swear at me Senator when I'm just asking a... McCain: I'm not swearing at you. I'm swearing I've had to have been smoking something pretty strong to vote for that outrageous use of taxpayers' dollars. Toggling to the economy at large, McCain added: "There's not a lot of happy people out there,...

Lately, Republicans have had a field day attacking the Obama administration for rising unemployment. The first Friday of every month, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the previous month's unemployment rate, has become a day Republicans eagerly look forward to and Democrats dread. In part, Democrats have themselves to blame. In promoting a big fiscal stimulus earlier this year, two of the administration's top economists, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, estimated that the unemployment rate would not go above 8% if stimulus were enacted. It has been well above that rate since February and is now above 10%. In...

Are economies inherently unstable? Are people driven by "animal spirits," and therefore susceptible to wild overreactions of stupidity and greed? And is government intervention necessary to stabilize these unstable, emotional markets? Or, do you believe that capitalism is inherently stable and that economic problems typically have their roots in government mistakes? These are the most basic of all economic questions. The answers cut one way or the other--either you believe and act as if the government is necessary for economic stability, or you do not. Every bit of economic analysis and most political decisions about fiscal policy take one side...

“I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank...

After reading Sunday’s Herald, I’m thinking seriously about becoming a deadbeat. And you know what? I feel great about it! That’s because I read in Sunday’s Herald how people who owe more on their homes than they are worth should just stop making their payments. Better still, we shouldn’t feel any guilt about it, or any sense that we’re “doing something morally wrong” either. That’s according to liberal academic Brent White of the University of Arizona. (How liberal? He’s argued that patriotic activities like the Pledge of Allegiance don’t belong in public schools.) In a new academic paper White says...

My mother-in-law produced a huge collection of pennies and issued each of us a stack of 50. The first round was Screw Your Neighbor. Everyone anteed up 3 pennies and very quickly a pot was accumulated in the middle of the table. We played winner take all, alternating between games: Bishop’s Pride, Baseball, Dime Store, 5 Card Stud, 5 Card Draw, and variations where we assigned wild cards such as One-Eyed-Jacks, black 7’s and such. Some of us, noticing our stacks of pennies were becoming depleted, simply reached into the penny jar and took more pennies to stay in the...

(snip) I am concerned, however, that a number of the legislative proposals being circulated would significantly reduce the capacity of the Federal Reserve to perform its core functions. Notably, some leading proposals in the Senate would strip the Fed of all its bank regulatory powers. And a House committee recently voted to repeal a 1978 provision that was intended to protect monetary policy from short-term political influence. These measures are very much out of step with the global consensus on the appropriate role of central banks, and they would seriously impair the prospects for economic and financial stability in the...

A deal for General Motors Co. to sell Saab to a specialty carmaker has collapsed, leaving the storied Swedish brand born from jets in 1947 close to extinction. Koenigsegg Group AB, a consortium formed by Swedish luxury sports car maker Koenigsegg Automotive AB, said Tuesday it pulled out of the deal in part because it was unable to agree with investors on how best to move the brand from mass-market to premium. For GM, it was the third time this year that a deal to shed one of its brands fell apart as it tries to recover from a stay...

Republican candidate for Senate in Connecticut Peter Schiff destroys Obama's ideas for "bailing out" the American economy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XipUWfxZ0lk&feature=subtivity

Let us now praise Goldman Sachs, for the sole reason that it and it alone among the major, capital-intensive Wall Street institutions – both recently deceased and still living – actually understands something about risk and risk-taking. By his own admission, Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman’s chief executive, ranks risk management as his number one daily priority, even ahead of doing God’s work. “I’m a risk manager and I’ve been that for a long time, a lot longer than I’ve been CEO,” he said recently at a breakfast in New York sponsored by Fortune magazine. “I live 98 per cent of my...

Have a close look at the screencap. Notice what Norah O'Donnell's holding in her left hand? Those are notes, with factoids from the 2008 presidential campaign. She's reading from them to challenge a Sarah Palin supporter who was waiting in line at the book signing yesterday in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We all remember how back during the '08 campaign, MSM reporters would challenge people attending Obama rallies with uncomfortable truths about their candidate, along the lines "would you still support him if you knew he had the most liberal voting record in the Senate?" Or not. I certainly can't remember...

Echoing comments made by a Democratic lawmaker Wednesday night, two Republican members of the Joint Economic Committee today called for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to resign.

"Too big to fail" meets "Just the right size to steal from the taxpayers." Sounds like a horror movie - and believe me, if you read this piece by Jill Schlessinger at CBS News' Econowatch, you will be sickened by this colossal boondoggle that not only cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars but actually enriched Geithner's Wall Street friends in the process - friends who had just themselves been bailed out by us: OK, so let's get this straight: the financial world is melting down, Uncle Sam had just saved the bankers' butts and now Tim Geithner the President...

So, I'm sure many of us have been getting these letters, see the URL for an example, in the mail from our credit card companies. Since my wife passed away, I've been able to pay off all of them and now have just one card with CitiBank that I use and now pay off each month. I like it because I get airline miles on it and I've had the account for over 20 years. Citibank took $300BILLION of tax payer bail out money and have tried to jack up my rates twice since July. The first time, I called...

Dear Lloyd Blankfein: You know it, don’t you? You know that it doesn’t matter. You can’t win. You could shed tears in an hour-long mea culpa on Oprah! You could pay yourself no more than one dollar for the next ten years. You could pledge $5 billion to a hundred of Barney Frank’s favorite charities. meanstreet And it still wouldn’t matter. The public anger towards Goldman is just too hardened. In an economy full of losers, everyone is fixated on hating the winner. And that kind of hate doesn’t just go away. It takes time to dissipate. And, unfortunately, the...

The government’s watchdog over the bank bailout program is criticizing Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s handling of one of the most sensitive moments of last year’s financial meltdown, questioning decisions he made while heading up the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The new report criticizes the New York Fed’s decision in the fall of 2008 to bail out insurance giant AIG by covering its clients’ losses, sending tens of billions in taxpayer dollars to overseas banks.

LONDON (MarketWatch) -- Goldman Sachs said late Tuesday that it would provide $500 million to support small businesses, hours after its CEO Lloyd Blankfein apologized for the group's role in the global financial crisis. Goldman has faced growing criticism over its likely massive bonus payouts as the U.S. economy remains in turmoil. It has also received, and subsequently paid back, $10 billion of aid from the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Lawmakers expect to cap fund to dismantle a big failed bank at $200 billion Legislation mandating broad regulatory reform in the banking industry continued to take shape on Tuesday with lawmakers approving limits on the amount of taxpayer funds that could be used to dismantle "too-big-to-fail" insolvent financial institutions. The House Financial Services Committee made other changes to the bank reform bill, including alterations to the structure of the Federal Reserve. The legislation seeks to amass funds from large financial institutions and hedge funds that would be used to make payments to creditors and counterparties of a large failing financial...

Realtors to push for more credit to commercial property Industry group's agenda shifts from home-buyer tax credits to lending issues By Amy Hoak, MarketWatch SAN DIEGO (MarketWatch) -- After successfully lobbying for an extended and expanded home-buyer tax credit, the National Association of Realtors will focus its policy agenda in the months ahead on relief from a credit crunch in commercial real estate, among other issues. "The commercial area is something that is going to be in the news more and more, as loans are rolled over and need to be refinanced," NAR senior vice president and chief lobbyist Jerry...

DETROIT -- General Motors Co. on Monday reported a $1.15 billion loss on an unaudited basis for the period from July 10 to Sept. 30, providing the first evidence of the auto maker's improvement since emerging from bankruptcy protection.

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The Federal Housing Administration's capital reserves have fallen to razor-thin levels, increasing the likelihood the agency will eventually require a taxpayer bailout, and adding fuel to the debate about how much support the U.S. should provide to the mortgage market. The FHA has said for months that its reserves for unexpected loan losses would fall short of the required 2% level by this fall. But an audit of the FHA released Thursday showed that reserves have been depleted much faster than the agency and analysts had expected. The FHA's capital-reserve fund fell to $3.6 billion as of Sept. 30, down...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Leading U.S. bank regulator Sheila Bair said on Friday that the government's capital injections into the largest banks was "probably not a good thing." Bair, the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, said the billions of dollars of capital infusions last year had a terrible impact on public perception of the financial industry and government regulators. "I think at the time it sounded like the right thing to do and, again, it was part of an international effort, but I just see all the problems it's created," Bair said during an interview with PBS NewsHour. "I...

Hard to believe, but as a number of banks, plus two auto companies have been bailed out,look for newspapers to BEG to be bailed out also. Even as I read this article, I sat here stunned. But as I calmed myself, I realized, I should not be surprised. Banks, investment houses, automobile companies, and now … newspapers. The state of New Hampshire last week agreed to guarantee 75 percent of a $250,000 loan from an Upper Valley bank to the new owner of the Eagle Times, an unusual deal because it involves a daily newspaper and the government it covers....

Here is video of former President George W. Bush today in a speech he gave at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, admitting that he went "against" his "free market instincts" when he decided to move forward with the Wall Street Bailouts in the Fall of 2008. But Bush warned: "History shows that the greater threat to prosperity is not too little government involvement, but too much."That's exactly right. He should have stuck to his principles and instincts. Obama is sticking to his principles and instincts in trying to ratchet up government involvement in everything to the greatest extent possible. Bush...

Within the last year and a half, the federal government has provided hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up otherwise failing corporations and financial intermediaries. This mating of economics and politics, inevitably steeped in favoritism, justifiably has earned denunciations from many sources, including National Legal and Policy Center. Labor unions also have been among the critics. Yet their leaders habitually put high principle aside when their own hides need bailing out. Case in point: a bill introduced in late October by Rep. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D. (see photo), the Preserve Benefits and Jobs Act of 2009 (H.R. 3936). This legislation...

IF THIS DOESN'T HACK YOU OFF, NOTHING WILL!!! Take your blood pressure meds, a Prozac and click on the link. It was described thus by an earlier critic of the madness we're now living through: “By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many (THAT'D BE MOST OF US), it actually enriches some.” (THAT'D BE GOLDDMAN-SACHS!) John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of The Peace, 1920 Obozo and Bawney Fwank are...

Claremont – The state of New Hampshire last week agreed to guarantee 75 percent of a $250,000 loan from an Upper Valley bank to the new owner of the Eagle Times, an unusual deal because it involves a daily newspaper and the government it covers. The Executive Council on Wednesday unanimously approved without debate the “working capital loan guarantee,” which would be administered by the New Hampshire Business Finance Authority. Under the deal, the BFA and the state would be liable to pay up to $187,500 to Connecticut River Bank if Eagle Printing & Publishing LLC defaulted on the $250,000...

Nov. 7, 2009, 10:29 a.m. EST Brown urges global tax to fund bank bailouts By William L. Watts, MarketWatch LONDON (MarketWatch) -- British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Saturday urged finance officials from the world's 20 largest industrialized and developing nations to weigh a global tax on financial transactions that would be used to fund bank bailouts. "I believe we should discuss whether we need a better economic and social contract to reflect the global responsibilities of financial institutions to society," Brown told finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 nations gathered at St. Andrews in Scotland....

It is not often the case in this crazy time in America that someone like myself would be aligned with a self proclaimed socialist, Bernie Sanders from Vermont. While I find Sanders view on almost everything to be abhorrent, wrong and flat out anti-American, the man has some serious cojones. Specifically the introduction of the bill that he wishes to be called Too big to fail, Too big to exist Act. Actually on the subject of aligning with socialists, Sanders also submitted a version of Ron Paul's House bill to audit the Fed and this would then mark the second...

WATCH VIDEO (1:43)chuckdevore.com - Nobody is really sure what Carly Fiorina really stands for. In the past year she has supported the bailout parts of the stimulus, cap and tax, and other liberal policies proposed by President Obama and Barbara Boxer. Can we really trust Carly on these issues?