As Dick Polman writes today, the Obama Administration put themselves in a box on jobs that will be difficult to emerge from. While the spending cuts in the near term are not all that large, the very real shift to austerity on practical and rhetorical terms means that legitimate job creation programs are right out. [...]

Paul Krugman waltzed into the foreclosure fraud settlement today, with a column that even John McCain found himself agreeing with. That’s because it criticizes the Obama Administration for letting the banks get off easy in the aftermath of the financial crisis, and in preparing to offer a settlement on foreclosure fraud that amounts to a [...]

Every couple months, the idea that “TARP worked” bubbles up from the Administration. Usually it takes the form of saying that the economy was saved at a very low cost. But now the Treasury Department is getting bolder. They claim that, based on the latest numbers, TARP turned a profit. This is hedged with the [...]

Under Dodd-Frank, companies designated as a systemic risk to the economy are subject to greater regulation. And the Oversight Board designed to monitor systemic risk has come up with a novel way to determine those firms, allowing them to argue their way out of it! Financial companies under consideration for Federal Reserve oversight will get [...]

Well, here we go again with the TARP PR machine. Today’s story notes that Fifth Third Bank has paid back their TARP funds, meaning that 99% of all bank-delivered funds have been repaid and that the program stands to make a $20 billion profit on the bank side. This proves that old adage about lies, [...]

I’m reading the Obama 2012 budget, which has finally come online. I will say there are several decent policies in it, but a lot of them represent items that were rejected under a strongly Democratic Congress. For example, the Administration returns to the Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee as a pay-for. They actually put this out [...]

When I summarized the House Oversight Committee hearings on TARP and foreclosures, I basically said that Democrats were the ones talking about foreclosures, for the most part. But I missed earlier in the hearing when Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) of the Republican Study Committee asked SIGTARP Neil Barofsky point-blank whether HAMP should be repealed. Barofsky [...]

The House Oversight Committee is holding its first hearing since Darrell Issa got the gavel today, and it’s on TARP and foreclosures. And that bifurcation is accurate – the Republicans on the panel, for the most part, are asking about TARP, and the Democrats are asking about foreclosures. Timothy Massad of the Treasury Department (filling [...]

Tim Geithner won’t show up to House Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa’s first hearing, on TARP and the foreclosure crisis, sending a top deputy instead. The deputy, Tim Massad, has no real experience with the Administration’s foreclosure mitigation programs. “The secretary welcomes the committee’s interest in our management of TARP, a successful program that was [...]

I have so many problems with the narrative that TARP and the bank bailouts in general were an unqualified success that I don’t know where to begin sometimes, but a few articles out today should provide a good place. First, it’s clear that the Federal Reserve nursed banks back to health far more effectively and [...]

I’ve been writing consistently about the need to increase funding for legal services for foreclosure victims. As an investment, it certainly beats HAMP when it comes to actually helping borrowers avoid foreclosure. Moreover, states want to use federal block grants that come out of TARP for this purpose, but have to date been blocked by [...]