http://whowhatwhy.com Groundbreaking Investigative Journalism That Explores the Truth Behind Current Events Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:14:43 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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, ... http://whowhatwhy.com/2009/09/23/credit-where-credit-ain%e2%80%99t-due/ 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 ... http://whowhatwhy.com/2009/07/07/florida-banking-regulators-aided-and-abetted-stanford/ 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 ... http://whowhatwhy.com/2009/06/24/ubs-or-just-plain-bs/ 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 ... http://whowhatwhy.com/2009/06/18/who%e2%80%99s-got-obama%e2%80%99s-ear/ 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 ... http://whowhatwhy.com/2009/05/30/moral-hazard-fed-style/ 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,” ... http://whowhatwhy.com/2009/05/27/2-trillion-700-billion/ 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 ... http://whowhatwhy.com/2009/05/22/treasurys-shadowy-bid-to-bilk-taxpayers/ 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 ... http://whowhatwhy.com/2009/05/21/ny-times-deals-new-card/ 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. ... http://whowhatwhy.com/2009/05/11/if-more-means-less-does-less-mean-more/