Reading Time: < 1 minute This 12-year-old Canadian girl may or may not have had help with her ideas. But then, don’t we all? Is her speech any less hers than, say, one by Mitt Romney?
Reading Time: 2 minutes In the New York Times, Joe Nocera argues that Obama’s steps at regulating Wall Street are tepid compared to FDR’s and are likely to leave in place some of the very mechanisms that contributed to the crisis. Read this excerpt, if not the entire piece, then my closing comment: [T]he Obama plan is little more Read More
Reading Time: 2 minutes How exactly did the Federal Reserve gain the emergency authority to loan more than $1 trillion of taxpayer money to the banks secretly and without oversight? The Washington Post explains today in a long investigative piece by Binyamin Appelbaum and Neil Irwin. As it turns out, Sen. Chris Dodd slipped the necessary language into an Read More
Reading Time: 2 minutes We’ve heard a lot rumbling from the banks in the past several weeks about how committed they are to repaying the TARP money they have received at the soonest opportunity. The motive of such talk is clear: Paying back TARP money would clearly be seen as a sign of strength,” Douglas Elliott, fellow at Brookings Read More
Reading Time: < 1 minute Steve Gandel at Time thinks Citigroup should have failed its stress test: When the results of the government’s financial stress tests were announced last week, Citigroup seemed to have dodged a bullet. The bank, long thought to be in the worst shape among the nation’s largest lenders, was said to need just $5.5 billion in Read More