House investigators are alleging a White House double standard in its rhetoric toward executive compensation for large financial institutions. The allegations appear in a report released in advance of a hearing on government-back housing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. President Obama ramped up the populist rhetoric in 2009 with respect to bonuses for executives at private financial companies, but has been silent on comparably large bonuses for officials at Fannie and Freddie, according to the report, released Wednesday by House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA). The …
The Small Business Lending Fund was cleverly named by its authors last Congress. Since its implementation, however, it would appear a more appropriate name would be the Bailed Out Bank Refinancing Fund. When Barney Frank and other supporters proposed the SBLF, it was believed banks would leverage the fund leading to hundreds of billions in small business loans. In their world, Congress was to allocate, Treasury was to disburse, banks were to lend and small businesses were to grow. Seems like an airtight plan, right? Then came reality. More than …
$154 billion. That is the amount of taxpayer money that will be needed to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac according to a new “stress test” performed by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. And that is the good news. If the economy dips into a second recession and foreclosures rise, the Fannie and Freddie bailout could nearly double in size. The agency, which oversees Fannie and Freddie, released the numbers “to inform public debate about the future of the two companies” ahead of expected Obama administration proposals slated for …
This past Friday the Associated Press reported: Nearly half of the 1.3 million homeowners who enrolled in the Obama administration’s flagship mortgage-relief program have fallen out. The program is intended to help those at risk of foreclosure by lowering their monthly mortgage payments. Friday’s report from the Treasury Department suggests the $75 billion government effort is failing to slow the tide of foreclosures in the United States, economists say. Faced with this reality, Media Matters fellow Duncan Black blogged:
Carnegie Mellon University economics professor and American Enterprise Institute visiting scholar Allan Meltzer has a must read op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal titled: Why Obamanomics Has Failed: Uncertainty about future taxes and regulations is enemy No. 1 of economic growth. It is re-posted in its entirety below but as an added bonus we have added links supporting many of his factual and theoretical claims: The administration’s stimulus program has failed. Growth is slow and unemployment remains high. The president, his friends and advisers talk endlessly about the circumstances they …
A whopping 62 percent of Americans now say the United States is on the wrong track, yet President Barack Obama and liberals in Congress continue to steer the country in the same downhill direction toward bigger government. That runaway train picked up more speed this morning, as a House-Senate conference committee came to a final agreement on a Wall Street reform bill that’s packed with $19 billion in new taxes and fees on banks (which consumers will end up paying), a new consumer-unfriendly Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and a complete …
On October 13, 2008, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson summoned the CEOs of the nation’s largest banks into a gilded conference room at the Treasury Department just a stone’s throw away from the White House. Each CEO was then handed a one-page document that said their company would agree to sell hundreds of billions worth of equity to the federal government through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). “We plan to announce the program tomorrow – and that your nine firms will be the initial participants.” In case anyone missed the …
Bloomberg news has an article on Wall Street pay revealing that the CEOs of many large banks have taken big pay cuts in the past year or two (CEO pay at the 50 largest financial firms has fallen 37% in the past two years). Buried in the story was a revealing comment from Obama Administration “Special Master for Compensation” (Pay Czar) Kenneth Feinberg who declared that pay cuts for the CEOs of big banks “demonstrates better than anything the political impact of what I’m doing.” Feinberg goes on to suggest …
It must not be easy being Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, these days. His latest task is to sell a skeptical Congress on the Obama Administration’s $90 billion bank tax with something of a convoluted snake oil sales pitch. He tried to make his argument to the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday. You see, Geithner explained, “Banks should bear the costs for bank failure,” and the tax is really a “too-big-to-fail tax” designed to recoup funds used to bail out banks under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Unfortunately for Geithner, that …
With all the damaging bills coming out of Congress today, and promises of more to come, it is easy to lose sight of necessary positive policy changes that Congress should be making to improve the tax code and increase economic growth. Representatives Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) look to fix that by proposing a series of changes to the tax code that will finally make those long-needed advancements. Their bill, H.R. 5029, proposes the following: 1) Eliminate the tax on capital gains. The current tax code taxes capital …
