A group of Republican freshman members of Congress have together accumulated more than $1.4 million in unused personal office funding, The Daily Caller has learned. But instead of those tax dollars going directly back to the U.S. Treasury, they’re going into what South Carolina Rep. Mick Mulvaney called a “black hole fund.” (more)
American International Group Inc. and the Treasury Department priced a big offering of common stock in the insurer at $29 late Tuesday, an important step in the government’s effort to sell its majority stake. (more)
The wisest and most successful bond investor of all time, Bill Gross, has dumped his bond fund’s $150 billion investment in U.S. bonds. One should not ignore the importance of this event. The largest bond fund in America no longer believes that Treasury bonds are a good investment. Moreover, Gross is not alone. Blackrock, the world’s largest money manager, is now underweighting Treasuries overall and reducing the duration of the bonds it still holds. That means they are dumping their long-term bonds, which are the most sensitive to interest-rate changes, in favor of Treasury instruments that mature in a year or less. (more)
November has been one tough month for President Barack Obama. (more)
Despite the anti-discriminatory stipulations included as part of Arizona’s immigration enforcement law, President Obama has repeatedly joined with foreign leaders and ethnic pressure groups to condemn the statute as an affront to human rights that enables and encourages racial profiling. (more)
President Obama’s approval rating has crossed into a new danger zone over the last month, as fresh concerns over the economy have pushed his positives and negatives into upside down territory, a development that will cause political winds to blow even harder against Democrats this fall. (more)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said that allowing tax cuts for the wealthy to expire would be “the responsible thing to do.” (more)
Small banks screwed by TARP — Nancy Pelosi is going to claw out Robert Gibbs’ eyes — Scott Brown is such a tease — How can the FCC make sure that America is pure if it cannot control curse words? — Slap fight breaks out between NAACP, Tea Party — Deficit report: We are slightly less broke than last year, still broke though (more)
The Treasury special inspector general responsible for the Troubled Asset Relief Program got it right in his report saying that the termination of Chrysler and General Motors auto dealerships may have ended up costing more jobs than necessary, the National Automobile Dealers Association said Monday. (more)
Topics – House Reforms, Derivatives Clarified, Treasury Profits, SEC Limits Political Contributions, Former SEC Leaders Advise Hedge Funds, AIG’s Dear Prudence, and Stocks Continue to Drop (more)
A Texas pipeline tycoon who died two months ago may become the first American billionaire allowed to pass his fortune to his children and grandchildren tax-free. (more)
Sen. Richard Shelby, Alabama Republican and the ranking Republican member of the Senate Banking Committee, gave a final speech on the Senate floor Thursday in advance of the final vote to pass a financial regulation bill, which passed later in the evening. (more)
The bailout in a rear view mirror: Since 2008, the Federal Reserve has refused to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion in emergency loans from American taxpayers, despite congressional demands and private lawsuits. On Tuesday, the Senate voted to force the Federal Reserve to disclose, for the first time, key details of loans to financial firms during the crisis. The Sanders amendment would require the Fed to provide names of borrowers and amounts of loans on emergency-loan programs that are mostly shut, as well as on its mortgage-backed securities program and arrangements to swap dollars for other currencies with foreign central banks. The measure would cover only loans from December 2007 to the date the law is enacted, wouldn’t apply to future lending and wouldn’t require disclosure of ongoing discount-window borrowings. (more)
When the Obama administration imposed restrictions on executive pay last year at some of the largest companies the government had bailed out, officials said they were aiming to set a new standard for compensation across corporate America that would discourage risky business practices. (more)
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and other top Obama administration officials on Tuesday called the U.S. unemployment rate “unacceptable” and urged lawmakers to support the president’s efforts to spur job creation and overhaul the financial regulatory system. (more)
The U.S. Constitution vests all the “legislative powers” it grants in Congress. The Supreme Court allows Congress to delegate some authority to executive officials provided an “intelligible principle” guides such transfers. Congress quickly wrote and enacted the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 in response to a financial crisis. The law authorized the secretary of the Treasury to spend up to $700 billion purchasing troubled mortgage assets or any financial instrument in order to attain 13 different goals. Most of these goals lacked any concrete meaning, and Congress did not establish any priorities among them. As a result, Congress lost control of the implementation of the law and unconstitutionally delegated its powers to the Treasury secretary. Congress also failed in the case of EESA to meet its constitutional obligations to deliberate, to check the other branches of government, or to be accountable to the American people. The implementation of EESA showed Congress to be largely irrelevant to policymaking by the Treasury secretary. These failures of Congress indicate that the current Supreme Court doctrine validating delegation of legislative powers should be revised to protect the rule of law and separation of powers. (more)
Treasury officials say they’re considering ways to sustain trading in the $3.8 trillion-a-day repurchase agreement market as the Obama administration plans a regulatory overhaul that may change how banks fund operations. (more)
Rep. Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat, was among the most aggressive interrogators pummeling Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner at Wednesday’s House Oversight committee hearing on the 2008 Wall Street bailouts. (more)
Economists, lawmakers and regulators have pinpointed the explosive growth in credit default swaps — complex, unregulated financial contracts often compared to gambling bets — as a central cause of the financial crisis, particularly the government rescue of AIG. (more)
President Obama is now saying that “we’ve recovered most of your money already, but we want all our money back.” Does anyone really know how much money is out and how much is back? Is there money left on the table? (more)
