Here we go again. It seems that every couple weeks, somebody else writes a counter-intuitive, made-for-Slate story about how TARP is actually a great success coming in under cost, and how it might actually turn a profit. Jackie Calmes does the honors today. Even as voters rage and candidates put up ads against government bailouts, [...]

AIG and the government have settled on a plan that will allow Treasury to sell its stake in the company. Here are the main details: Under the plan, the Treasury Department will, for a time, own 92.1 percent of A.I.G. before it begins to sell its shares. Because A.I.G. turned out to need a bigger [...]

I can hardly believe the hand-wringing over the relative success of TARP, popularly known as the bank bailout. It’s based on a fiction that the only problem anyone had with it was that it gave a lot of money to the banks without the expectation of getting it back. Now that the money specifically handed [...]

Good news everyone! We’re getting our money back from AIG! That’s right, the company who received at least $180 billion dollars in bailout money is finally ready to return it! And they’ve done so, to the tune of… $4 billion dollars. Cue the Sad Tuba. “This is continuing tangible evidence of AIG’s progress in repaying [...]

Katrina vandenHeuvel caused a stir last night by tweeting that the White House would choose Elizabeth Warren to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This would have been big news if Robert Gibbs didn’t pick today to go kamikaze on the “professional left.” Marcy is absolutely right that the nomination would only be the first [...]

Nobody knows more about bad deals than Joseph Cassano, the head of the disastrous AIG Financial Products division. I wanted to loop back to his testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, because he made a statement about some other bad deals about which he had some intimate knowledge: AIG’s former derivatives chief said Wednesday [...]

If Joseph Cassano, the head of AIG’s disastrous Financial Products unit, has granted an interview since the insurance giant melted down, I certainly don’t remember it. That’s what makes today’s Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission hearing so interesting. The theme is the derivatives market, and there will be a particular emphasis on AIG and Goldman Sachs, [...]

Ryan Grim has the latest from the FinReg negotiations: The insurance industry is poised to rip a gaping loophole in financial reform’s investor protections, working to insert a provision in the conference committee report that was passed by neither the House nor the Senate. The measure would exempt securities products created by insurance companies from [...]

There are animals in the wild whose coping mechanism when being hunted by predators is to stand perfectly still and hope that the predator passes right by them. This is what Goldman Sachs seems to be doing. Goldman Sachs Group Inc’s lawyers are in talks with representatives of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to [...]

The Goldman Sachs civil suit is not an open and shut case; few securities fraud cases truly are. It sounds pretty obvious – Goldman told investors they were setting up a synthetic CDO of mortgage backed securities without disclosing that their partner was shorting them. But the proof of that may be harder to come [...]

JP Morgan Chase would rather see their customers thrown out on the street rather than take less on their mortgages. At issue, you see, is the sanctity of contracts. In testimony to be delivered Tuesday afternoon, David Lowman, chief executive officer for home lending at the “Too Big To Fail” behemoth, will fight back against [...]