Free Republic

Robert Wilumstad, the former CEO of insurer AIG said no to a $22 million dollar severance package that he was entitled to under the terms of his employment contract. After being ousted as a condition of the Federal takeover, Willumstad’s decision to reject the deal is a bright spot in an otherwise cloudy situation.

WASHINGTON — Leading congressional Democrats called Monday for a cautious, deliberative approach to stabilizing troubled financial markets as lawmakers confronted this vexing issue with an election-year recess drawing near.

This is the state of our great republic: We've nationalized the financial system, taking control from Wall Street bankers we no longer trust. We're about to quasi-nationalize the Detroit auto companies via massive loans because they're a source of American pride, and too many jobs — and votes — are at stake. Our Social Security system is going broke as we head for a future where too many retirees will be supported by too few workers. How long before we have national healthcare? Put it all together, and the America that emerges is a cartoonish version of the country most...

The recent economic downturn could push the European Union to adopt more modest ambitions in its fight against climate change. Although the European Commission has said it wants to cut greenhouse gases by 20 percent by 2020, business leaders oppose the use of fines to oblige industry to reduce its emissions -- especially in the current economic crisis. The cost to industry is estimated at some 44 billion euros per year between 2013 and 2020, with a tonne (1.1 US tons) of C02 costing 30 euros. Business leaders have denounced the policy as a "tax", threatening to take their investments...

As the enemies of capitalism declare the death of the greatest and most productive form of organisation that humanity has ever achieved, it seems appropriate to quote what Warren Buffet, the greatest capitalist of our age, warned about mortgage derivatives in his annual Berkshire Hathaway letter of 2002: ... derivatives severely curtail the ability of regulators to curb leverage and generally get their arms around the risk profiles of banks, insurers and other financial institutions. Similarly, even experienced investors and analysts encounter major problems in analyzing the financial condition of firms that are heavily involved with derivatives contracts. When Charlie...

With news last week Tuesday that Primary Reserve Fund had "broken the buck", rumors started to fly in a very nervous market, and by Thursday morning of last week, financial institutions began to put in redemption requests by the hundreds of millions for their funds at money market mutual funds. In total...$500 billion in redemption orders were sitting on the desks at money market fund officies, Thursday morning. Only a quick injection into the system of $105 billion by the Fed prevented the redemptions from being exercised. The injection of capital into the market was followed up by calls from...

Good morning. This is John McCain, speaking to you from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Here and all across our country, people are wondering what exactly is happening on Wall Street. And with good reason, they want to know how their government will meet the crisis. Clear answers are hard to come by in Washington. There are certainly plenty of places to point fingers, and it may be hard to pinpoint the original event that set it all in motion. But let me give you an educated guess. The financial crisis we're living through today started with the corruption and manipulation of...

In a change from the original proposal sent to Capitol Hill, foreign-based banks with big U.S. operations could qualify for the Treasury Department’s mortgage bailout, according to the fine print of an administration statement Saturday night.

"....Michael Greenberger served as the CFTC's director of trading and markets at the time. A proponent of tougher oversight, he recalls the Greenspan-Rubin resistance as being fierce and across-the-board. "If we had prevailed, the [subprime-securitization] party would never have gotten started; the wildness wouldn't have happened," he says. "There would have been auditing requirements, capital requirements, transparency. No more operating in the shadows. Bear Stearns, Lehman, Enron, and AIG would be thriving, and spending every waking hour complaining about regulatory restraints imposed upon them." Now a law professor at the University of Maryland, Greenberger adds: "In a booming economy, people...

As the Wall Street meltdown continues, private-sector financial institutions have no choice but to swallow the market’s harsh verdict on the past decade’s financial engineering. Stunned global investors won’t give financial firms any more money, forcing the firms into bankruptcy if they’re not lucky, or into the arms of Uncle Sam or of much bigger companies, if they are. But as the House Financial Services Committee proved on Tuesday, the public sector somehow feels it can continue to ignore reality—at least for a little longer. The committee, chaired by Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, took steps to gut a modest reform...

<p>Congress says it likely will adjourn this month having done nothing on the most important issue in America right now: the financial meltdown from the subprime lending crisis.</p> <p>Can Congress just walk away from a problem it helped create? Maybe, maybe not.</p>

Fury at $2.5bn Lehman bonus Nomura and Barclays table bids today for US giant’s London operation as bank’s administrator likens collapse to Enron John Waples and Danny Fortson STAFF at Lehman’s New York office who helped to cause the world’s biggest corporate bankruptcy are to share in a $2.5 billion bonanza. The bonus, which has been described by London staff as a “scandal” has been pledged by Barclays Capital, the British-based bank that last week acquired Lehman’s American operation and took on 10,000 staff. The $2.5 billion (£1.4 billion) pot, which has been ring-fenced as part of the acquisition, has...

Most important was corruption and mismanagement at the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. (Freddie Mac), which together controlled 90 percent of the secondary mortgage market. Fannie and Freddie went broke because they bought billions of dollars worth of subprime mortgages, on which borrowers defaulted when the housing bubble popped. Fannie bought most of its bad mortgages from Countrywide Financial, whose CEO, Angelo Mozilo, gave sweetheart loans to senior executives of Fannie Mae. Fannie and Freddie cooked their books so senior executives would be paid millions of dollars in bonuses to which they...

For his entire presidency, George W. Bush has tried to avoid the fate of his father, brought low by a feeble economy. Now, as the financial crisis radiates far beyond Wall Street, Mr. Bush faces an even grimmer prospect: being blamed, at least in part, for an economic breakdown. “There will be ample opportunity to debate the origins of this problem,” Mr. Bush said in the Rose Garden on Friday. “Now is the time to solve it.” But in Washington, on Wall Street and on the presidential campaign trail, the debate has already begun. Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential...

Taxpayers face a tab of as much as $200 billion for a government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the formerly semi-autonomous mortgage finance clearinghouses. And Sen. Christopher Dodd, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, has the gall to ask in a Bloomberg Television interview: "I have a lot of questions about where was the administration over the last eight years." We will save the senator some trouble. Here is what we saw firsthand at the White House from late 2002 through 2007: Starting in 2002, White House and Treasury Department economic policy staffers, with support from...

Financial Crisis Is A Winner For Republicans; Here’s How I Got There The current financial meltdown has caused the Fed to step in and take over certain aspects of the economy best left in private hands. There is a mantra being repeated which claims every household is now on the hook for tens of thousands new debt else the debt will be heaved upon our grandchildren to pay it. That is absurd since the debt is in the form of loans which will be resolved and the floundering assets sold once fiscally sound again. But fiscal fallacies are not the...

There is no one explanation of what went wrong with the financial markets. Simply put, it is a case of many people deciding that age old rules need not be followed anymore – combined with breathtaking corruption. Both political parties share some blame in some stupid things that happened, although the Democrats seem to be well in the lead as far as corruption and stupidity goes. Let’s trace some history.

NOTE: this is from several years ago with a 2006 update. Raines actually made $90 million. ================================================================== Proving you can fool most of the people most of the time until you get caught, Franklin Raines, who reigned for 5 years following Clinton's appointing him as CEO of Fannie Mae, the US' quasi-governmental mortgage house, has been ousted. There are several ongoing investigations of Fannie Mae's operations and accounting practices covering the last 5 years in order to determine when accounting irregularities started and the magnitude of the financial shortfalls. Current estimates indicate that there was a $9 billion misstatement of...

"Gains privatised and losses socialised" was the more pointed comment by Nouriel Roubini, professor of economics at the Stern School in New York University. He is known in the economics trade as a "permabear" because of his repeated claims over the last six years that a financial system based on self-regulation, non-deposits, highly leveraged subprime housing debts and globalised derivatives trading was unsustainable and would collapse. Now that he has been proved correct he has suddenly become known to wider circles of people desperate to get some expert perspective on these events. How does this crisis compare to previous ones?...

President Bush defended the $700 billion cost of his financial bailout proposal, saying Saturday it needed to be massive so that turmoil on Wall Street did not spread to Main Street. Bush pledged to work with Congress to quickly pass legislation as part of the largest financial bailout since the Great Depression. "You get it's big because it needed to be big," Bush said, acknowledging that hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money is being put at risk. "I believe when it's all said and done, however, that the taxpayer is going to get a lot of that money...