treasury

Who Knew Jack Lew?

Jacob_J._Lew_signatureWhen Obama nominated current White House chief of staff and former Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew for Treasury Secretary all the main stream press could talk about was his loopy signature.

What they are not amplifying is Jack Lew's Wall Street connections and ties to think tanks which often promote corporate centric policies that harm the U.S. middle class.

BoA Took the Money and Ran, You Should Too

By now all of America has heard about BoA's $5 dollar a month fee to use a debit card, or $60 dollars a year just to use a standard feature of any checking account in the digital age.

The question becomes, why would anyone keep their money with Bank of America?  Switch!  It's easy!  There are all sorts of online banks, credit unions which offer free checking, assuredly free debit card use, free ATMs and even offer interest on low balance checking.

 

 

America, vote with your consumer power and leave BoA, Wells Fargo or any other financial institution nickel and diming you to death. All these banks care about is keeping their executive bonuses rolling in.

Today we've heard from the 2008 TARP bank bail out inspector general, SIGTARP, that banks left TARP early, not because they wanted to pay back the taxpayer, or because they were financially stable....they left the bank bail out early in order to increase executive pay. The terms of TARP limited executive pay so banks were hell bent on getting out of it, despite their flimsy financial footing.

Guess who was at the top of that list?  Bank of America.

"We've Known Since Enron" - Lehman Hearing Testimony

We've Known Since Enron - Bill Black

William Black, former S&L crisis regulator, is referencing the Flim-Flam man, never ending scam, coming out over the Financial collapse. The entire financial meltdown didn't need to happen if our government and regulators and especially the Federal Reserve had been doing their jobs. He calls the SEC criminally negligent. The below video clip is from the Lehman Brothers hearing in the House Financial Services Committee yesterday. The hearing is specifically the Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc. bankruptcy examiner's report.

New COP Report - Guarantees Created Significant Moral Hazard

On Friday you were probably bowled over by the unemployment rate. So astounded, we missed this major report release by COP, the Congressional Oversight Panel on TARP.

The Report, Guarantees and Contingent Payments in TARP and Related Programs is another damning condemnation on corporate socialism to the point of moral hazard. Yet, at the same time, the report says taxpayers will likely profit from the huge TARP gamble. Well, well, if the government is turning the world into a glorified casino with U.S. taxpayer money, all the while guaranteeing the bonuses profits of large banks, at least it looks like we won't take the loss.

TARP COPs are back - Report Assesses Treasury Strategy & Actions on Financial Crisis

The Congressional Oversight Panel has released a new report, Assessing Treasury’s Strategy: Six Months of TARP. First, the $$$:

Over the last six months, Treasury has spent or committed $590.4 billion of the TARP funds. Treasury has also relied heavily on the use of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet which has expanded by more than $1.5 trillion (not including expected TALF loans) in conjunction with the financial stabilization activities it has undertaken beyond its monetary policy operations. This has allowed Treasury to leverage TARP funds well beyond the funds appropriated by Congress.

UPDATE 8 : NEWSFLASH: Geithner nomination and the return of Lawrence Summers?

NBC is reporting that Federal Reserve Bank of New York President, Timothy Geithner has been nominated by President-elect Obama to be the new Treasury Secretary.

As new developments occur, I will update. Below is a brief from Wikipedia about the nominee.

After completing his studies, Geithner worked for Kissinger and Associates in Washington, DC, for three years and then joined the International Affairs division of the US Treasury Department in 1988.

In 1999 he was promoted to Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs and served under Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers.