The Wall Street Journal reports: The Obama administration, under pressure to show it is serious about tackling the budget deficit, is seizing on an unusual target to showcase fiscal responsibility: the $700 billion financial rescue. The administration wants to keep some of the unspent funds available for emergencies, but is …
Sunday, CIT Group, with $71 billion in assets one of the largest small business lenders in the country and the recipient last December of $2.3 billion in taxpayer money filed for bankruptcy. It was the fifth largest bankruptcy in US history. Monday, nothing much happened. Stocks didn’t collapse. There was …
The Treasury Department and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank have just released a highly complex 253 page draft bill that is supposed to deal with questions ranging from indentifying and dealing with systemic risk facing the financial services system, regulating and closing failing “too big to fail” financial …
The Obama Administration promised unprecedented transparency in its financial recovery efforts, including a gee-whiz $18 million web site, Recovery.gov. The problem is that the Administration seems addicted to secret back-channel orders to the private sector to obey, “or else”. Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reports on a secret “memorandum of understanding” …
We have long believed that the Treasury Department’s TARP interventions have become possibly the single most disruptive force in the global economy. Under the header The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves, EconLog’s David Henderson flags a New York Times story suggesting that the Fed has become just as unhelpful …
WHY TARP NEEDS OVERSIGHT The announcement that the government would provide $30 billion dollars more in TARP funds to General Motors in exchange for a 60 percent ownership interest in the company is unprecedented and almost unbelievable. Who ever imagined the taxpayers would wake up Monday morning and find out …
Obama administration Council of Economic Advisers member Austan Goolsbee was on Fox News Sunday yesterday defending Obama’s intervention in the economy. In the clip below, he is actually defending the White House’s new pay czar, but his logic applies equally well to any of Obama’s new companies, from AIG to …
During yesterday’s Senate Banking committee TARP oversight hearing, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) asked Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner: So it’s your understanding that you have $700 billion to use permanently as you see fit? Secretary Geithner replied: I’m not quite sure ‘permanently’ is right. So then what is the right word? …
