While Washington debates cutting Social Security and Medicare the facts are in on the “recovery” – it’s a bust. Not only has unemployment remained historically high – 7.7% officially, 23% by the old metrics – but poverty has spiked to historic highs. The U.S. Census Bureau puts the number of Americans in poverty at levels [...]

In a new report the Special Investigator for TARP cites the Treasury Department for allowing excessive pay to bailout companies: SIGTARP found that once again, in 2012, Treasury failed to rein in excessive pay. In 2012, OSM approved pay packages of $3 million or more for 54% of the 69 Top 25 employees at American [...]

Transcripts released by the Federal Reserve reveal the central bank misinterpreted the downswing in the housing market as a positive signal of the market pricing in risk rather than the beginning of a bust that would quickly unravel the financial markets. From the Financial Times: Top officials at the US Federal Reserve took months to [...]

Thanks but no thanks? After AIG’s Ad blitz thanking America for letting them raid the treasury the company made another announcement: AIG is considering Wednesday whether the company should join a lawsuit against the government that spent $182 billion to save it from collapse. American International Group Inc. said its board of directors will weigh [...]

In what borders on performance art, AIG is launching a public relations campaign to thank American taxpayers for letting them extort bailout money from Congress.

The Economist’s print edition gives one of the unlikelier reviews to Neil Barofsky’s Bailout and Sheila Bair’s Bull by the Horns that I’ve seen (I’ve read the former, and am making my way through the latter). In it, they acknowledge that the US bank bailouts were horribly unfair to the individual Americans who ultimately financed [...]

The Special Inspector General for TARP, Christy Romero, has recommended that the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department stop using LIBOR, the benchmark interest rate derived in such a slipshod way that it was rigged for years. But the Fed and Treasury aren’t taking Romero up on the request. The Treasury and the Fed should [...]

Behind the scenes of last night’s debate – well behind – is a foreclosure crisis that has entered its sixth straight year. This is another fire that has not been put out. The only approach in the debate to even talking about this fire was a brief discussion by Gov. Romney about qualified residential mortgages, [...]

Four years after taking over the troubled insurance giant AIG, the US will sell its majority stake in the company in an $18 billion deal that appears to be more symbolic than anything. The sale will mark a step that seemed hard to imagine four years ago, when the New York insurer was effectively nationalized [...]

I’d be a bit surprised to see Neil Barofsky grace the airwaves of CNBC again. Clearly the empty suits over there don’t appreciate someone who doesn’t immediately defer to the Masters of the Universe. You simply cannot make the simple case that TARP had a specific goal to increase lending and help homeowners that went [...]

I went through last week why I don’t think Ed DeMarco will be fired. Now Neil BArofsky, who has a passing knowledge of the individuals involved, entered this debate. Last week the acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Ed DeMarco, made a familiar argument. He announced that he would not approve the Obama [...]