Tag: TARP

With workers all over the globe trudging through a catastrophic recession, it's almost a given that governments will be battling the economic slide for a long time. Part of the effort to rebuild must involve new rules and regulations, but meaningful systems for economic accountability will be just as essential. If we do not hold the reckless executives who caused this crisis accountable for their actions, we risk regressing into similar turmoil in the near future.

Some of the largest U.S. banks may be on the ropes these days, but the disparity between the plight of financial executives and ordinary Americans has never been starker. Over the past two decades, the banking system has grown accustomed to scoring massive profits by preying on its own customers, making 2009's transition to pilfering taxpayer wallets an easy one. After burying the economy under a mountain of unaffordable debt, bank CEOs are now finding ways to subsidize their own paychecks with taxpayer bailout funds.

Talk of government pillaging and vague threats of a ballot box revolution at yesterday's nationwide "Tea Party" protests missed a prime opportunity to advance a cause we can all get behind — ending abusive bank overdraft charges by the very institutions taxpayers bailed-out courtesy of the Bush Administration's 2008 Troubled Assets Relief Program. Our Washington Independent colleague Mike Lillis has the skinny on just where the pitchforks and torches should be aimed.

The national "New Way Forward" protest against the Obama-Geithner bank bailout is gaining momentum in Colorado. On the Web site facilitating the action, people are signing up to rally Saturday at banks and public buildings around the country. Denver sign-ups to meet on the west steps of the Capitol have climbed to 145 people.

For more on what went wrong with the economy and why it will be so difficult to fix, there's good material of every length on the web these days -- and most of it lands on one answer.

On Sunday, would-be-president John McCain weighed in with a predictable do-nothing solution to the ongoing global financial catastrophe, telling Fox News the U.S. government should "make the hard decision" and let the banks simply fail. It's another policy embrace of "Fail" as a philosophy from the at-sea Republican party.

Paul Kiel at ProPublica has compiled a list of the nation's largest banks likely to go under increased scrutiny by federal bank regulators after receiving billions of dollars in TARP bailout money. Neither the feds or the banks will say which ones receive "forward-looking economic assessments." If you're like me, with a bank on the list, resist the urge to strangle your friendly local lending institution with the EKG cords dangling from your own gasping account.

Banks that received government bailout money are taking heat for spending billions of dollars on bonuses, executive pay and lavish outings. But there’s another outrage that Washington seems to be missing: the growing number of bank-owned properties in foreclosure scarring neighborhoods across the country.

While conservative financial pundits and Wall Street kingpins work themselves into a frenzy over the prospect of nationalizing floundering banks, one key fact is missing from the discussion — it's already been done. President George H.W. Bush created the Resolution Trust Corp. to save failed savings and loans following the financial meltdown spurred by the Reagan recession.

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.