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NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Another trading day and another low for Bank of America's stock. Shares of Bank of America dropped more than 3% Tuesday, hitting a new 52-week low of $5.03 -- its lowest level since March 12, 2009. After the close of trading Tuesday, Bank of America was one of 37 financial institutions downgraded by S&P. Beyond the S&P downgrade, trading could become even more complicated in Bank of America's stock, if it falls below $5. Under that threshold, many broker-dealers will not allow investors to buy or short a stock on margin, according to a spokesperson for...

In the wake of the $700 billion TARP bailout, Warren Buffett apparently shaped a plan to clean up toxic assets that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner later adopted–resulting in massive profits for Buffett.That’s the latest bombshell revelation from investigative journalist and Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer’s sensational new book, Throw Them All Out. According to Schweizer, after the bailout bill’s passage, Warren Buffett sat down and wrote then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson a four-page private letter laying out a plan to clean up the toxic assets plaguing numerous financial institutions. Buffett proposed something he called a “public-private partnership fund.” For every $10 billion...

Texas Rep. Ron Paul, long dismissed by the GOP establishment as a fringe candidate, has broadened his electoral appeal and emerged as a major player in the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, according to several recent polls and conversations with a handful of longtime Hawkeye political operatives... In a Bloomberg News survey — conducted by renowned Iowa-based pollster Ann Selzer — Paul was in a four-way statistical tie for first along with businessman Herman Cain, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich... And, in a new Iowa State/Gazette/KCRG survey, Paul took 20 percent — behind only Cain...

12/31/2010 9,390,476,088,043.35 4,634,739,130,665.17 14,025,215,218,708.52

A plan by beleaguered Bank of America to foist trillions of dollars of funky Merrill Lynch derivatives onto its depositors is raising eyebrows on Wall Street. The rarely used move will likely save the bank millions of dollars in collateral but could put depositors’ cash behind the eight ball. The move also brought to light fissures between the nation’s top banking regulators, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Federal Reserve, in the wake of new regulations meant to curb the free-wheeling habits that fostered the worst crisis in a generation back in 2008. At issue is BofA’s decision to...

Some fascinating survey data from Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen: On Oct. 10 and 11, Arielle Alter Confino, a senior researcher at my polling firm, interviewed nearly 200 protesters in New York's Zuccotti Park. Our findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion. Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn't represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they...

It's no accident that Mitt Romney has done so well during this election cycle. He has excellent name recognition, he's extremely well organized, he's a great fundraiser, he's become a polished debater, and he's not gaffe prone. His business experience doesn't hurt either, although it is worth noting that the only reason he's able to brag that he's not a "career politician" is because he lost to Ted Kennedy for the Senate and probably would have lost in 2008 had he run for governor of Massachusetts again. All that being said, there's a reason why Mitt Romney has been unable...

The U.S. plans on being an active partner as efforts intensify to get Europe get back on its feet financially, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told CNBC Friday. Getty Images U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner With global leaders preparing for next month's Group of 20 nations (G20) summit in Cannes, France, the International Monetary Fund — of which the U.S. is the greatest contributor — is being relied on to help underwrite whatever efforts are needed to backstop toxic European sovereign debt . Geithner said the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has "very substantial" resources to fund a device that could look...

Almost everyone who believes in the Constitution and free markets properly considers October 3, 2008, one of the darkest days in U.S. history. It was on that day that the “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act” creating the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) became law. A day later, I wrote that law’s passage, accompanied by tactics and threats which amounted to orchestrated blackmail, over the strident objections of over 150 economists from across the political spectrum, only days after its initial voter-driven failure, proved that Washington’s politicians and elites “don’t care what we think.” Abhorrent as it was, the sickening saga of...

San Francisco bank executives cooked their books and lied to auditors just before they accepted a $298 million taxpayer bailout, federal prosecutors said Tuesday. They now have the distinction of being the first senior executives of a bank that received federal bailout funds to be criminally charged in connection with a scheme to defraud the government and American taxpayers. The Securities and Exchange Commission charged former United Commercial Bank CEO Thomas Wu and vice presidents Ebrahim Shabudin and Thomas Yu with illegally obscuring their bank’s mounting losses. A separate indictment charged Shabudin and Yu with securities fraud, conspiracy, falsifying corporate...

(Wall Street Journal) - More than half of $4 billion in federal funds disbursed this year to spur small business lending by community banks was used to repay bailout funds that the banks received under the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. The Small Business Lending Fund was meant to raise capital at smaller banks, which tend to lend more heavily to small businesses, in the hopes of jump-starting growth and employment. But instead of directly lending to small businesses, many of the banks used the money to rid themselves of higher-cost TARP debt...

Pelosi: Wall Street protests are a Main Street reaction to bank bailouts By Jamie Klatell - 10/08/11 12:08 PM ET House Minority Leader Nancy Pellosi (D-Calif.) said the Occupy Wall Street protests are a reaction government putting "Main Street at the mercy of Wall Street" by bailing out failing financial institutions. In an interview for Sunday's "This Week" on ABC, Pelosi said that the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which was passed in 2008 when she was House Speaker and signed by President George W. Bush, was one of the causes for the demonstrations. "I think one of the most...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal regulators bowed to pressure from big banks seeking a quick exit from the financial bailout program and did not uniformly apply the government's own conditions set for repaying the taxpayer funds, a new watchdog report says. The report was issued Friday by the office of Christy Romero, the acting special inspector general for the $400 billion taxpayer bailout of the financial industry and automakers. It found that regulators, to varying degrees, "bent" to pressure from the banks in late 2009 and relaxed the requirements put in only weeks earlier. The regulators also were motivated by a...

Bank of America Corp plans to charge customers who use their debit cards to make purchases a $5 monthly fee beginning early next year, joining other banks scrambling for new sources of revenue. U.S. banks have been looking for ways to increase revenue as regulations introduced since the financial crisis limited the use of overdraft and other fees.

A recent article on Newsmax.com by John Berlau exposes another scheme by the Obama Administration designed to redistribute more wealth in an effort to cover taxpayer losses in the General Motors and Chrysler bailout fiasco. The plan is to have financial institutions with assets of more than $50 billion to continue to pay a "financial crisis responsibility fee" until TARP losses by firms like GM and Chrysler are recouped. Of course, cronies at GM and Chrysler are not on the hook for the losses. It seems that the old playbook used by Obama to have others pay for the...

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: WSJ - Governors Against State Bailouts Hard to believe, but not everyone in politics wants a free lunch by Rick Perry and Mark Sanford Tuesday, December 02, 2008 • Press Release The Wall Street Journal Governors Against State Bailouts Hard to believe, but not everyone in politics wants a free lunch Dec. 2, 2008 By Rick Perry and Mark Sanford As governors and citizens, we've grown increasingly concerned over the past weeks as Washington has thrown bailout after bailout at the national economy with little to show for it. In the process, the federal government...

Eric Cantor (EricCantor) on Twitter

In the run-up to the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve fueled the housing bubble with its easy money policy. Now, we know that after the crisis struck, the Fed secretly propped up elite bankers all the way from Wall Street to Brussels to the Central Bank of Libya. A Bloomberg news investigation found that while the Treasury Department was pumping $700 billion into banks under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the Fed was covertly operating its own bailout program — the biggest in American history. The Fed's Shadow TARP issued $1.2 trillion in loans to domestic and foreign banks from...