“Bailout” on The Daily Caller

Last week, government-backed mortgage entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fined Bank of America $3 billion for selling faulty mortgages that either have, or will default into, huge losses. Now critics are calling the deal a backdoor bailout because the sum is much lower than the losses for which the bank could be held liable. (more)

98 American banks that received $4.2 billion in bailout money are teetering on the edge of collapse, according to the Wall Street Journal. (more)

The U.S. Treasury set plans to sell the last of its Citigroup Inc. common shares in a $10 billion offering that would cap the government’s biggest bank bailout of the financial-market meltdown. (more)

General Motors Co.’s recent stock offering was staged to start paying back the government for its $50 billion bailout, but one group made out much better than the taxpayers or other investors: the company’s union. (more)

A newly discovered exchange of e-mails led the House ethics committee on Friday to delay its trial of Representative Maxine Waters, a California Democrat accused of helping steer bailout money to a bank in which her husband owned shares. (more)

DUBLIN (AP) — Debt-crippled Ireland formally applied Sunday for a massive EU-IMF loan to stem the flight of capital from its banks, joining Greece in a step unthinkable only a few years ago when Ireland was a booming Celtic Tiger and the economic envy of Europe. (more)

When a government sells stock in a company, it is usually trying to maximize short-term revenue. Therefore, the share price is normally pegged at what the market will bear. If the valuation of the total stock offering is less than the value of the company (or a portion thereof) being sold, something is amiss. That is certainly the case with the initial public offering of GM stock sold to investors on November 17. The stock price is telling us something the federal government doesn’t want to admit, all the rhetoric about the supposed success of the GM bailout notwithstanding. (more)

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could cost taxpayers another $19 billion over the next three years, the bailed-out mortgage titans’ regulator said Thursday, but the total tab could nearly double if the U.S. economy slides back into a recession. (more)

President Obama’s nominee for deputy secretary of state has earned more than $8 million in salary and bonuses since January 2009 as an executive at a Wall Street bank that received a federal bailout. (more)

The U.S. government’s bailout of financial firms through the Troubled Asset Relief Program provided taxpayers with higher returns than they could have made buying 30-year Treasury bonds — enough money to fund the Securities and Exchange Commission for the next two decades. (more)

Former President George W. Bush said a decision to use taxpayer money to bolster the financial system in 2008 wasn’t difficult and was needed to avoid an economic collapse. (more)

Reporting from Washington — (more)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The government’s giant bank bailout may well have averted a second Great Depression, economists say, but a lot of voters aren’t buying it. Support for the program is turning into a kiss of death for many in Congress. (more)

WASHINGTON — Even as voters rage and candidates put up ads against government bailouts, the reviled mother of them all — the $700 billion lifeline to banks, insurance and auto companies — will expire after Sunday at a fraction of that cost, and could conceivably earn taxpayers a profit. (more)

According to their reelection campaign ads, Democratic Reps. Kathy Dahlkemper, Frank Kratovil, Dina Titus, Mary Jo Kilroy, and Glenn Nye all voted against the Wall Street bailout. Which is fascinating, since, as FactCheck.org pointed out a few weeks ago, not one of them was in office when the bailout was passed. (more)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal regulators took over three key lenders to U.S. credit unions, after losses on mortgage investments threatened to topple them. The move was a reminder that parts of the financial system are still burdened by the toxic assets two years after the financial crisis peaked. (more)

“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” That was the defining line of Oliver Stone’s 1987 film “Wall Street,” and his attack on the financial system that the news media would use for decades to portray businessmen as villains. (more)

Chrysler may have accepted millions in a federal bailout to stay in business, but now it has a scandal on its hands because of carloads of dope-smoking, beer-drinking workers on a shift break near a Detroit plant. WJBK Fox 2 News in Detroit caught dozens of Chrysler auto workers drinking alcohol and smoking what appear to be joints during their shifts at the automaker’s Jefferson North auto plant in Detroit. (more)

BAILOUT HEAD: Herb Allison, the head of the government’s $700 billion financial bailout program, announced Wednesday that he is resigning. (more)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The ranks of the working-age poor climbed to the highest level since the 1960s as the recession threw millions of people out of work last year, leaving one in seven Americans in poverty. (more)