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Credit Where Credit Ain’t Due

By Russ Baker on September 23, 2009

Two large debit-card issuers have suddenly decided to clean up their acts in the face of pending legislative action against them. The bigger question is: what’s to prevent them from pulling a bait and switch, first voluntarily revising their rapacious practices and then, when the threat of legislation dies down, ramping those practices right back up again?
As summarized by the… [Read the rest]

Posted in The Digest | Tagged Bank of America, banking, banking reform, banks, debit cards, finance, financial reform, JPMorgan Chase, New York Times, Ron Lieber | 1 Response

Florida Regulators Aided and Abetted Stanford

By David V. Johnson on July 7, 2009

The Miami Herald published a long investigative piece about how Sir Allen Stanford, whose Antigua-based banking empire has been shut down as a massive fraud, was able to open a Miami branch in 1998 free from regulatory oversight, with the approval of Florida banking regulators.
Stanford got his regulatory-free branch—one of his most lucrative franchises—despite the vehement objections of the state’s… [Read the rest]

Posted in The Digest | Tagged Antigua, Art Simon, banking, banks, Conference of State Bank Supervisors, finance, Florida Division of Banking, fraud, Greenberg Traurig, Jack Abramoff, Miami Herald, R. Allen Stanford, Richard Donelan, Stanford Financial Group, William K. Black | 1 Response

UBS or Just Plain BS?

By Russ Baker on June 24, 2009

The Obama Justice Department has just floated a trial balloon to see if it can drop a legal effort to force the Swiss Bank UBS to disclose the names of 52,000 rich Americans suspected of using the bank to evade US taxes. Back in February, the Justice Department sued the bank in an effort to force it to name names.… [Read the rest]

Posted in The Digest | Tagged banks, Family of Secrets, finance, Justice Department, New York Times, Russ Baker, Switzerland, tax evasion, tax havens, UBS | 1 Response

Who’s Got Obama’s Ear?

By Russ Baker on June 18, 2009

In the New York Times, Joe Nocera argues that Obama’s steps at regulating Wall Street are tepid compared to FDR’s and are likely to leave in place some of the very mechanisms that contributed to the crisis. Read this excerpt, if not the entire piece, then my closing comment:
[T]he Obama plan is little more than an attempt to stick some… [Read the rest]

Posted in The Digest | Tagged banks, Barack Obama, derivatives, Federal Reserve, finance, Joe Nocera, Larry Summers, New York Times, regulation, Timothy Geithner, Treasury Department | 1 Response

Moral Hazard, Fed Style

By David V. Johnson on May 30, 2009

How exactly did the Federal Reserve gain the emergency authority to loan more than $1 trillion of taxpayer money to the banks secretly and without oversight? The Washington Post explains today in a long investigative piece by Binyamin Appelbaum and Neil Irwin.
As it turns out, Sen. Chris Dodd slipped the necessary language into an FDIC reform bill that was passed… [Read the rest]

Posted in The Digest | Tagged banks, Barack Obama, Chris Dodd, Democratic National Committee, Federal Reserve, finance, H. Rodgin Cohen, Sullivan & Cromwell, Treasury, Wall Street, Washington Post | Leave a response

$2 Trillion > $700 Billion

By David V. Johnson on May 27, 2009

We’ve heard a lot rumbling from the banks in the past several weeks about how committed they are to repaying the TARP money they have received at the soonest opportunity. The motive of such talk is clear:
Paying back TARP money would clearly be seen as a sign of strength,” Douglas Elliott, fellow at Brookings Institute and former investment banker at… [Read the rest]

Posted in The Digest | Tagged banks, Dean Baker, Federal Reserve, finance, Goldman Sachs, Guardian, TARP | 1 Response

Treasury’s Shadowy Bid to Bilk Taxpayers

By David V. Johnson on May 22, 2009

The banks that received money under the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program also granted stock warrants so that taxpayers could capitalize on the risk of investing their money.
Bloomberg reports that the Treasury is well on its way to screwing taxpayers on the deal:
Banks negotiating to reclaim stock warrants they granted in return for Troubled Asset Relief Program money may shortchange… [Read the rest]

Posted in The Digest | Tagged banks, Bloomberg, Bob Jones (ONB), Old National Bancorp, TARP, Tim Geithner, Treasury | Leave a response

NY Times Deals New Card

By Russ Baker on May 21, 2009

Anybody who still appreciates the arcane pleasure of reading an actual newsprint newspaper knows how important it is what makes it onto the front page. The New York Times’s prominent placement of a column by personal finance columnist Ron Lieber signals an important development: traditional news organizations’ increasing willingness to level with readers and not hide behind elaborate exercises of… [Read the rest]

Posted in The Digest | Tagged banks, credit cards, New York Times, Ron Lieber | 1 Response

If More Means Less, Does Less Mean More?

By David V. Johnson on May 11, 2009

The Financial Times has reported that America’s top banks need not raise the full amount of capital mandated by the recent “stress tests” if they manage to book higher than expected earnings:
The banks have 28 days to announce their capital-raising plans and until November 9 to implement them. Wells Fargo and other banks that will have to raise capital told… [Read the rest]

Posted in The Digest | Tagged banks, finance, Financial Times, stress tests, Wells Fargo | Leave a response

THE GAME THAT GOES ON AND ON: A SWISS BANK, A PRESIDENT, AND THE PERMANENT GOVERNMENT

By Russ Baker on April 21, 2010

A little-noted presidential golf outing opens the door to an intrigue-filled world of financiers, murky international interests, money-laundering, tax evasion, and politics as not-so-usual.
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Last August, the presidential press corps followed Barack Obama and his family to Martha’s Vineyard for their brief vacation. The coverage focused on summery fare—a visit to an ice cream parlor, the books the president… [Read the rest]

Posted in The Real News Project

What Obama Is Up Against

By Russ Baker on March 10, 2010

The first anniversary of Barack Obama’s historic election finds many of his supporters already grousing. Fair enough: Obama has been more vigorous in some areas than others. But one essential question goes unasked: How much can any president accomplish against the wishes of recalcitrant power centers within his own government?
We Americans harbor a quaint belief that a new president… [Read the rest]

Posted in The Real News Project

Behind Clinton Backer’s Arrest:
a Bipartisan, International Affair

By Russ Baker on August 27, 2009

AP Photo/ Louis Lanzano

WhoWhatWhy.com reports exclusively on the background of Hassan Nemazee, the top Hillary Clinton fundraiser who was arrested and charged with forging loan documents. Early media accounts cast the event as an embarrassment for Ms. Clinton and the Democratic Party involving the financial misdoings of one prominent backer. Actually it is much more. Behind the Nemazee… [Read the rest]

Posted in The Real News Project

Hillary’s Bush Connection

By Russ Baker and Adam Federman on October 18, 2007

Research support for this story was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute. Published in conjunction with The Nation.
IN THE CLINTONS’ PURSUIT OF POWER, there is no such thing as a strange bedfellow. One recently exposed inamorata was Norman Hsu, the mysterious businessman from Hong Kong who brought in $850,000 to Hillary Clinton’s campaign before being unmasked as… [Read the rest]

Posted in The Real News Project

CIA Helped Bush Senior In Oil Venture

By Russ Baker on January 7, 2007

Newly released internal CIA documents assert that former president George Herbert Walker Bush's oil company emerged from a 1950's collaboration with a covert CIA officer.
A Real News exclusive, first published on The Huffington Post
Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford.… [Read the rest]

Posted in The Real News Project

25 Democratic Consultants

By Russ Baker on June 14, 2006

Jack Quinn served as Vice President Gore’s Chief of Staff, and later as Counsel to President Clinton. Now he is a partner in a political consulting and lobbying firm with a close friend of Tom DeLay, and together, they have represented clients who want to drill in fragile areas of Alaska, put the screws to already beleaguered American consumers, and… [Read the rest]

Posted in The Real News Project

Unholy Trinity: Katrina, Allbaugh and Brown

By Russ Baker on June 14, 2006

Michael Brown will forever remain the poster child for federal incompetence. And the central question has yet to be answered: who was Michael Brown, and how did he end up at the helm of the Federal Emergency Management Agency? Indeed, how did he and his predecessor and mentor, Bush political operative Joe Allbaugh, manage to turn FEMA, a once proud… [Read the rest]

Posted in The Real News Project

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