Matt Taibbi is out with his take on the Fed’s bailout lending revealed last month. He focuses on how two rich housewives with no apparent business experience got almost a quarter of a billion dollars in the TALF program. In August 2009, John Mack, at the time still the CEO of Morgan Stanley, made an [...]

A month ago, Brad Miller and a dozen other Congressmen — including House Financial Services Committee Chair Barney Frank — wrote the Financial Stability Oversight Council to ask that they look into the systemic dangers of foreclosure fraud. The letter requested that three very specific things be included in upcoming stress tests and overall consideration [...]

As promised over the weekend before I realized I had forgotten my Toobz, I wanted to compare the behavior of two bailout recipients, the UAW and the banksters. A number of people have pointed to this intriguing interview about the Korea Trade deal with the UAW’s President Bob King. In addition to confirming my math [...]

Yves does a thorough smackdown on the departing Michael Barr’s description of all the things the government is going to get to the bottom of the foreclosure fraud problem, noting that the foreclosure task force simply isn’t investigating the problem in enough detail to understand, much less solve, the problem. But I wanted to look [...]

As I noted, the Financial Stability Oversight Council is meeting today. As announced, they discussed foreclosure fraud and securitization. For less than 15 minutes. And then they moved on, without once raising the issue of whether or not the banks’ exposure due to securitization problems posed a systemic risk to our financial system. As the [...]

DDay has a really important post that–along with a great interview with Brad Miller–includes a letter from Miller and other members of Congress, urging the Financial Stability Oversight Council to take action to prevent the foreclosure fraud problem from becoming a systemic crisis. The letter reminds the FSOC that Dodd-Frank gives them the power to [...]

Chris Dodd didn’t have many questions in yesterday’s hearing on the foreclosure crisis. But he did use the opportunity to call on Tim Geithner to convene the Financial Stability Oversight Council to prevent this crisis from blowing up the economy. Dodd: Attorney General Miller, at the outset of my opening comments I talked about the [...]

From the Department of reading the wrong message in an election is this news, of Timmeh Geithner meeting with the Chamber of Commerce’s odious Thomas Donohue to talk about international issues (read: “let’s talk about other countries we can ship American jobs to”). But this week, the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, met with the [...]

In Steven Rattner’s book, he describes newly elected Barack Obama asking his advisors “Why can’t [the US automakers] make a Corolla?” Implicitly, of course, he was asking “why can’t they make a Corolla in the United States.” His economic advisors, according to Rattner, admitted they didn’t know: “We wish we knew.” The correct answer to [...]

Remember when Robert Gibbs justified his attack on the professional left by suggesting that they didn’t understand–but the rest of the country did–that Obama had gotten our economy moving again? Remember Recovery Summer, Obama’s effort to convince Americans that the economy had turned around? Well, we’ve already seen that voters don’t take their understanding of [...]