Free Republic

The investigators concluded that the Treasury under the federal bailout had invested $254 billion into companies but the preferred stock it got in return had a market value at the time of only $176 billion, or 69 percent of what the government paid, according to a congressional oversight panel report scheduled to be released today. Elizabeth Warren, the chairwoman of the panel, said former Treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. had promised that the government would buy the assets at their market value and that it was alarming that he didn't do so. "At various points, Treasury has articulated policy...

Today has been a busy day in Washington, House caved in to the new president and voted to delay the digital TV conversion - that means hundreds of millions more in advertising and planning of the conversion. Amendments were flying left and right in the Senate in hopes of salvaging the spending...err stimulus bill and finally Obama announced the beginning of fascism. Cleverly playing on the fears and anger of the American public, today Obama unveiled that all CEOs of companies that are currently receiving TARP money will be capped to $500,000 in pay and quickly reminding the public that...

Why is the federal government preparing to spend good money on bad goods -- namely the banks' toxic assets -- and then planning to store them in a so-called "aggregator bank," hoping they will improve with age? It's like politicians buying bags of rotting garbage and dumpster debris from their bankrupt cronies as a pretext to kick back public tax dollars to them. It's not right, and it won't work to revive the financial system and rejuvenate the economy. Every day we read that one primary reason the financial system is on the brink of collapse is that the banking...

After a year of yawning losses at the company, employees lamented that times were getting lean. The giant bank, the recipient of two multibillion-dollar rescues from Washington, had paid out only about $4 billion in bonuses. Only? If you’ve never worked on Wall Street, it is hard to wrap your head around the idea that a company that lost nearly $19 billion in a single year, as Citigroup did in 2008, could still pay its employees billions in bonuses. It is probably even harder to believe that some of those employees grumble about it.