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Published: 03/4/11

Opinion: Consumer Lending at Risk

By  Marty Robins - AOL News
Opinion: Consumer Lending at Risk

Anyone with an interest in maintaining the positive economic momentum we've recently seen should pay close attention to the startup of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB was created as part of the so-called Dodd-Frank law enacted last year to rectify the practices that led to the 2008 financial crash, with the goal of preventing abuse of consumers in financial transactions. But while the role these sorts of abuses played in the financial crisis isn't at all clear -- authoritative analyses tell us that it was much more the levels of debt, particularly low-quality mortgage debt ...

Published: 01/27/11

Federal Panel Finds Financial Crisis Was Avoidable

By  not in system - AOL News
Federal Panel Finds Financial Crisis Was Avoidable

WASHINGTON -- The government-appointed panel investigating the roots of the financial crisis says the meltdown occurred because government officials and Wall Street executives ignored warning signs and failed to manage risks. The crisis could have been avoided, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission determined in a final report released Thursday that was only supported by Democrats on the panel. Instead the country fell into the deepest recession since the 1930s and millions of people lost their jobs, the congressionally appointed panel concluded. The Bush and Clinton administrations, the ...

Published: 11/29/10

TARP Price Tag Down to $25 Billion, CBO Finds

By  David Knowles - AOL News
TARP Price Tag Down to $25 Billion, CBO Finds

(Nov. 29) -- Talk about bang for your buck! The Congressional Budget Office said today that the final price tag for the Troubled Asset Relief Program would total $25 billion when all is said and done. Considering that the U.S. government originally plunked down $700 billion to help rescue the nation's teetering financial system, the new estimate comes as a welcome surprise. As the nation's largest banks began paying back the federal government with interest for the loans, the amount owed the taxpayers has slowly dwindled away over the past two years. As for the outstanding balance, the CBO ...

Published: 11/25/10

Merkel, Sarkozy Want Quick Bailout for Ireland

By  not in system - AOL News
Merkel, Sarkozy Want Quick Bailout for Ireland

BERLIN (Nov. 25) - The 16-nation euro currency will survive the debt crisis, German Chancellor Angela Merkel vowed Thursday, and a senior central banker said the European Union would be willing to increase its ?750 billion ($1 trillion) bailout fund if necessary. Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy also called for a swift conclusion of the negotiations for an Irish bailout. Axel Weber, the head of Germany's central bank and a leading rate-setter at the European Central Bank, said Thursday that European nations would be willing to boost the emergency fund by as much as ?100 billion ...

Published: 11/4/10

Stocks Hit Highest Level Since Lehman Bros. Bankruptcy

By  David Knowles - AOL News
Stocks Hit Highest Level Since Lehman Bros. Bankruptcy

(Nov. 4) -- Are the bulls back? The Dow Jones industrial average today rose to its highest level since Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed for bankruptcy in 2008, at the height of the U.S. financial crisis, The Wall Street Journal reports. U.S. stocks rose by 219 points, or 2 percent of total volume, in trading at the New York Stock Exchange. That jump followed Wednesday's announcement that the Federal Reserve said it would buy $600 billion in U.S. Treasury securities to help stimulate the lackluster economy, AOL News reported. The stock market gains also come as a slew of corporate ...

Published: 10/26/10

Index Shows Perception of US Corruption Growing

By  Joseph Schuman - AOL News
Index Shows Perception of US Corruption Growing

(Oct. 26) -- Is corruption getting worse in the United States? That may seem the takeaway from this year's Corruption Perceptions Index from Berlin-based Transparency International, which saw the U.S. 2010 ranking slip to 22nd out of 178 nations from 19th last year -- the first time the United States has missed inclusion in the top 20 least-corrupt countries since the index was launched 15 years ago. Rising past the U.S. over the year were the tiny Caribbean island nation of Barbados (now 17th), the Persian Gulf emirate Qatar (19th) and Chile (21st). New Zealand, Denmark and Singapore -- ...

Published: 10/22/10

Economist Stiglitz: Put Corporate Crooks in Jail

By  not in system - AOL News
Economist Stiglitz: Put Corporate Crooks in Jail

Oct. 22 -- An institutionalized system of skewed incentives allowed Wall Street bankers and other corporate executives to gamble with America's wealth and then get away largely scot-free after the house of cards came tumbling down, plunging the U.S. into the worst economic crisis in decades and destroying trillions of dollars of wealth worldwide. That's the analysis of Joseph Stiglitz, an internationally renowned economist and winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics. (His latest book, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy, is just out in paperback.) ...

Published: 10/20/10

Bloomberg Report Shows TARP Profits Top Treasury Bond Returns

By  Steven Hoffer - AOL News
Bloomberg Report Shows TARP Profits Top Treasury Bond Returns

(Oct. 20) -- Returns on the Troubled Asset Relief Program used to bail out the financial industry, better known as TARP, generated higher profits for taxpayers than 30-year Treasury bonds, according to a Bloomberg report. The government earned $25.2 billion on its investment of $309 billion in the financial sector, which many critics originally believed would result in losses of hundreds of billions of dollars. However, concerns persist regarding the TARP program. "From the perspective of the taxpayers getting their money back, TARP has been a great success," Todd Petzel, chief investment ...

Published: 09/23/10

Robert Reich's Advice to Obama: Pick Fights, Connect Dots on the Economy

By  Jill Lawrence - Politics Daily
Robert Reich's Advice to Obama: Pick Fights, Connect Dots on the Economy

Robert Reich has watched one president after another lose his voice once he's in Washington, surrounded by aides with what Reich calls "an instinct for the capillary" and little feel for the simple overarching narrative that makes perfectly clear what you are trying to accomplish. Don't get him wrong. The Berkeley public policy professor, a veteran of the Ford, Carter and Clinton administrations, said in an interview that Barack Obama is "a wonderful president" with "a superb temperament" for whom he has "enormous respect." There was a slight pause before he continued. "I would rather he be ...

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