The Trickle-Down Theory of Stimulus

Pensions: Angry populists' next target
FORTUNE -- In these dog days of our Great Recession, no one is feeling especially lenient toward Taxpayer-funded Fat Cats. But what if that "Fat Cat" isn't some Wall Street Banker (most of whom have paid back government loans with interest) but rather the retired small-town city manager in Northern California living on $261,000 or the 40-year-old former New York City cop who gets to collect $100,000 a year for the rest of his life? Even as we watch a Populist revolt against the...

In Speech to Bankers, Warren Minces No Words
Elizabeth Warren declared her top priority is simpler Mortgage and Credit Card agreements, telling 400 members and guests of the Financial Services Roundtable at a dinner in Washington, Credit agreements have gotten long and complicated. "In fact, theres a new epithet: fine print, said Warren, a Harvard Law School Professor. I understand that some of you call it mice type. Where I come from, nobody calls fine print, hidden fees and surprise penalties negotiated contract...

Warren Reaches Out to Bankers, Says U.S. Consumers Need Clarity on Risks
Elizabeth Warren , the Harvard Law School Professor appointed to help set up a new U.S. consumer Watchdog, told Wall Street executives she wants to work with them to create clearer contracts for financial products.

Warren extends olive branch to bankers
Close Ariana Eunjung Cha writes about The Economy for the Post and is the Web editor for its national economy and business section. She has served as the paper's bureau chief in Beijing, Shanghai and San Francisco and as a correspondent in Baghdad. Contact her at [email protected]

Dean Baker: Bankers Running Wild: Foreclosure Flurry in Florida
Virtually everyone has had the experience of being forced to pay a late fee or a bank penalty because of some fine print provision that we overlooked. Sometimes begging by good customers can win forbearance, but usually we are held to the written terms of the contract no matter how buried or convoluted the clause in question may be. That is the way it works for the rest of us, but apparently this is not the way the banks do business, at least when those at the other end of the contract are...

Missing banker prompts reward
Since then, Macomb County Sheriff Mark Hackel said, there has been no other phone activity, e-mails or contact from Widlak to anyone. He didn't take cash from his account and there didn't appear to be anything missing from his home. His name has not been found on a plane or bus ticket or any other form of transportation since he was last seen walking out the back door of Community Central Bank. Hackel declined to detail where in St. Clair Shores Widlak's iPhone activity occurred and at what...

Unserious Central Bankers
These days there seem to be two types of thinkers in the world of Central banking. On one side there are serious people people who believe that we should raise Interest Rates in the face of high Unemployment and falling Inflation, because, well, thats what serious people do. On the other side there are unserious people, who believe that Central Banks should fight Deflation as well as Inflation, and try to prevent the current slump from turning into a quasi-permanent state of depression....

Reward offered in search for Mt. Clemens banker
Since then, Macomb County Sheriff Mark Hackel said, there has been no other phone activity, e-mails or contact from Widlak to anyone. He didnt take cash from his account and there didnt appear to be anything missing from his home. His name has not been found on a plane or bus ticket or any other form of transportation since he was last seen walking out the back door of Community Central Bank. Hackel declined to detail where in St. Clair Shores Widlaks iPhone activity occurred and at what...

Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Joseph Stiglitz: Obama Has Confused Saving the Banks with Saving the Bankers
AMY GOODMAN: Your first assessment of the Speech last night? Joseph Stiglitz: Oh, I thought it was a brilliant Speech. I thought he did an excellent job of wending his way through the fine line of trying to say—give confidence about where were going, and yet the reality of our economy—country facing a very severe economic downturn. I thought he was good in also giving a vision and saying while we’re doing the short run, here are three very fundamental long-run problems...

AIG
Preliminary thoughts on the tax bill: 1. It’s not the way you should make policy — it’s clumsy, and it will punish some innocent parties while letting the most guilty off scot-free 2. But — there wasn’t much alternative at this point. And for that I blame the Obama people. I’ll leave to others the question of who knew or should have known that the Bonus firestorm was coming; but it’s part of a pattern. At every stage, Geithner et al have made it...

Lost in the system that took the house
Now, as Fernandez seeks to appeal his Eviction and get his home back, he has learned that the Law Firm representing the banks is under investigation for fabricating Foreclosure documents. And his file was signed by Jeffrey Stephan, a document processor who made headlines last week for approving what could be hundreds of thousands of cases without verifying whether the Foreclosures were justified. Fernandez says he longs for the days when Homeowners knew the Bankers holding their Mortgage and...

Is Government About to Make Mortgage Market Even Worse?
Today's weekly Mortgage applications survey from the Mortgage Bankers Association seemed to offer a small glimmer of hope. Photo by:Seven_Null7 Government purchase applications have been driving the market for the past year, Accounting for, at times, nearly half of all new loans. Yes, refinancingswhich have been running at around 80 percent of all Mortgage applicationsfell despite a new record low average rate on the 30-year fixed of 4.38 percent. Not so good. But on the other hand,...

A Warning Sign in Canceled I.P.O.'s
Wall Street just lost some Insurance in more ways than one. At the 11th hour, the Liberty Mutual Group yanked the initial public offering of its property and casualty arm. The $1.2 Billion deal would have been the biggest flotation in the United States this year. It was also being closely watched as a barometer of investor appetite for the backlog of new share sales meant to keep Bankers busy. Weaker trading volumes already had many of them nervous about their fates. If I.P.O.s flag too,...

Is Ted Strickland Recovering?
Four weeks ago, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland looked cooked . The Incumbent Dem was trailing his challenger, former GOP congressman (and Lehman Bros. Banker ) John Kasich, by double digits in some polls. But this week, things suddenly started looking brighter for Strickland. Several polls put him a few points back, within the Margin of Error, while a partisan Dem poll showed him in the lead . Polling guru Nate Silver upgraded  Strickland's chances—but only to 13 percent, up from 8...

SKS Microfinance IPO Attracts Strong Demand
BY SATISH SARANGARAJAN AND JOHN SATISH KUMAR Mumbai—SKS Microfinance Ltd.'s $347 million initial public offering of stock was subscribed 13.8 times after drawing strong investor demand, one of the Bankers involved in the deal said Monday. The IPO, the first in India by a microfinance institution, has attracted significant attention to an area of The Economy that is still nascent as an organized sector. Order-taking from institutional investors ended ...

Drug history
William Randolph Hearst, for whom the term "yellow journalism" was coined, owned much of the timber industry. He used his newspaper empire to gin up a bogus, and Racist, case against cannabis to protect his timber holdings. At the same time, Dupont had just patented plastic formulas using petroleum products, and hemp oil threatened the enormous profits those Patents would reap. Dupont's Banker, Andrew Mellon, was also Secretary of the Treasury, and he appointed a nephew to head the new...

Switzerland Is The Only Haven For Americans Trying To Avoid Debt Chaos
Geneva police are hunting a vindictive attacker of Swiss private Bankers in a bizarre footnote to recent pressures on Swiss banking. The frenzied search was triggered after envelopes concealing blue canisters of a corrosive liquid akin to sulphuric acid were mailed to the homes of nine private Bankers. An eight-year-old child whose face was seriously burned was among three people injured, while the targeted Victims are understood to be high profile figures in the banking community. It was a...

Picketers clash with police in Spanish general strike
Airlines cancelled flights, picketers blocked trucks from delivering produce and Police clashed with Protesters as Spanish workers staged a general strike today to Protest Austerity measures imposed by a government struggling to slash its Budget Deficit and overcome Recession. The stoppage was the opening salvo of a day of Protest expected to see tens of thousands of people taking to streets in several European capitals to Protest belt-tightening measures that unions see as punishing...

Academics Disclose Your Conflicts
To debut on October 8, Inside Job , promises to chronicle the origins and response to the Financial Crisis by the power elite, especiallybankers but others included. Some media reports say it will target academics in particular, highlighting the likes of Larry Summers, who, along with people like Rob Rubin, ride the gravy train between Boston, New York, and Washington. Only the naive think Professors are public-regarding altruists,the hyping of the Documentary suggests; they bring down...

Dems try to deflect voter anger toward Wall Street
OLYMPIA, Wash. — Patty Murray was stuck. Down in the polls for months and facing a well-known Republican challenger, the three-term Democrat was finding a difficult market for her hard-working-senator sales pitch. Then she started bashing Wall Street and saying her opponent is in the pockets of Bankers who want to Repeal Financial Regulations. Now, less than a month before ballots are distributed in Washington's vote-by-mail election, Murray is apparently benefiting from some...

Are Hedge Funds in for a Blood-Letting?
Its rare for a Wall Street firm to sack a tenth of its work force in one go. In finance, the compact between employers and their Bankers and traders is simple: work hard and get paid well. But any employee is also a flexible cost that can be removed the moment business halts. Hedge Funds have a similar approach. But the industry has yet to experience a sustained down cycle and its concomitant Job Cuts. Until now. D. E. Shaw , the Veteran alternative asset management shop that once employed...

#rsrh DSCC throws $250K down the Blumenthal rathole.
Makes you wonder who they took the money from in order to try to shore up a bad campaigner who lied about serving in Vietnam. Probably Illinois (mob Banker) or Florida (legacy Congressman); or maybe one of the states where they actually believed that they’d get a pickup - hey, stop laughing ! It was really cute of them*. Couple this with the ad buys in West Virginia and it’s turning into an interesting case of too many champagne glasses, and not enough...

Warren: An Olive Branch For The Banks ... If They Want It.
"Joe Kennedy had it right," Warren continued. "Good Regulations can create an opportunity for good businesses to thrive." She did cut any corners in sharing her views of some of the financiers' products, however, noting the intentional and damaging complexity of Consumer Financial contracts, and calling for clarity. Belying her confrontational reputation, Warren tried to walk a middle ground between prohibiting pernicious business practices and simply mandating more disclosure: She endorsed a ...

ND20 Alert: Elizabeth Warren Heads into the Lion's Den (Again)
ND20 Alert: Elizabeth Warren Heads into the Lion’s Den (Again) Wednesday, 09/29/2010 - 3:27 pm by Lynn Parramore | Post a Comment --> Wednesday, 09/29/2010 - 3:27 pm by Lynn Parramore | Post a Comment The new sheriff is set to give a Speech to some Bank robbers. Elizabeth Warren, creator of and adviser to the newly-minted CFPB, has never been one to shy away from those who disagree with her. (See, for example, her tough questions for Tim Geithner’s handling of TARP.)...

Emanuel mayoral team would need to explain $17 million bank pay
President Barack Obama made Rahm Emanuel a global name by appointing him White House Chief of Staff. President Bill Clinton and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley helped make him rich. The wealth and connections Emanuel amassed while working for all three men give him advantages -- and liabilities -- as he explores running for a job he has said he always wanted, mayor of his native city. Emanuel, 50, earned at least $17 million in three years as an Investment Banker after leaving the Clinton White...