Finally. A grown-up version of the popular 1970s Schoolhouse Rock TV series. Media designer Jonathan Jarvis uses a creative web animation to explain the short and simple story of the credit crisis.
In an intellectual cage match between Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and voice of the Republican Party Rush Limbaugh on dealing with bank failures, my money’s on the smart fella who previously worked for the World Bank.
As the Obama administration launches a new bank rescue plan and prepares to overhaul the financial regulatory system, lawmakers will look closely at the lending practices of major banks and mortgage firms. But some think they also should probe the government-chartered Federal Home Loan Banks, which served as lenders of last resort as the credit crunch intensified — propping up the very banks that made the kind of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis in the first place.
Harvard Law professor and Troubled Assets Relief Program oversight chairwoman Elizabeth Warren provides the most cogent argument for long-overdue transparency in the bailout process yet.
I hate to bring this up, given all the good feelings today, but as Washington celebrates, Wall Street had a record Inauguration Day slide, led by fears that banks are in terrible shape and getting worse, CNBC reports.
When the government announced in November that it would use mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to streamline loan modifications for possibly hundreds of thousands of borrowers, officials billed the idea as a fast-track program to fight foreclosures. What no one mentioned is that homeowners would have to sign away their rights to sue, if they wanted to get those loans modified.
The Great Depression permanently changed the government’s role in the U.S economy, and it appears increasingly plausible that the current recession will have an equally lasting policy legacy. The
bailouts orchestrated by the Bush administration have been an absolute mess, but they present an opportunity to create new consumer protection-oriented economic programs the likes of which we haven’t seen since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
[If the American News Project video report on the banking industry's complicity in the Wall Street meltdown didn't get you steaming, read this. - ed]
Over at Beat the Press, economist Dean Baker raises an interesting question that deserves follow-up: Is there a hidden tax credit for Citigroup in the upcoming Obama administration’s proposed stimulus plan?
The financial crisis seems as if it emerged from nowhere and struck as hard and fast as lightning. How did so many financial institutions crumble with so little warning? There are many reasons, but one that has not been given much attention is how tax havens helped enable the mess — and how several of the big companies that have received billions of bailout dollars were also the most active in the shady world of offshore finance.
After a full year of woefully inadequate government responses to dire economic conditions, President-elect Barack Obama will inherit an economy that faces challenges on just about every front.
Progressive media has been keeping a spotlight on low wages, abusive credit card policies and weak student loan programs of late, while maintaining a focus on Obama’s pending economic recovery package.
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