On Monday, Bank of America (BofA) stocks briefly traded for under $5. Yes, you could buy a share of BofA for less than the noxious debit card fee they tried to force down your throat. BofA is massive, with assets equivalent to 15 percent of U.S. GDP. So why is it trading for the price …
On October 3, 2010 the U.S. Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) will end. The expiry is likely to generate many celebratory claims from federal government officials that the bailout is over, and that taxpayers have been made whole or will be made whole in short order. While it is true that many TARP bailout …
Use the links below to take action now to reform the economy. It’s NOT Such a Wonderful Life While it may it be a wonderful life for the big banks on Wall Street, here on Main Street too many of us are struggling this holiday season. The financial sector has collapsed the economy – gifting …
In a testament to the power of independent media, the award-winning public television show Frontline this week helped push a top Department of Justice (DOJ) official out the door. On Tuesday, Frontline aired a report called “The Untouchables” detailing the DOJ’s failure to prosecute the big banks for the 2008 financial meltdown and zeroing in on Lanny Breuer, the former White House …
Frontline Gets Its Man: Lanny Breuer Leaves DOJ After Exposé Read More »
A new study released today by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) shows that, despite rosy statements about the bailout’s impending successful conclusion from federal government officials, $1.5 trillion of the $4.8 trillion in federal bailout funds are still outstanding. The analysis, presented in charts and an online table and program profiles, is based …
Champions of financial reform who fought hard for a strong Wall Street reform bill this year know they cannot let down their guard. They are tracking and countering the moves of the big banks as they try to weaken the Dodd-Frank law during the implementation phase. They are bracing for a battle with Republicans who …
Is Geithner Planning a Stealth Attack on the Wall Street Reform Bill? Read More »
In July 2008, Florida lawyer Lynn Szymoniak received foreclosure papers on her home. Szymoniak had encountered financial difficulties after spending several years caring for her ailing mother while simultaneously fighting her own health problems, and failed to re-negotiate her adjustable-rate mortgage with her lender. But Szymoniak, a former Certified Fraud Examiner with FBI training, noticed …
Today a right-left coalition scored a victory for the American people when Senators voted 96-0 to audit the Federal Reserve. The Center for Media and Democracy’s Wall Street Bailout Tally shows that since 2008, the U.S. government has flooded Wall Street banks and financial institutions with $4.7 trillion dollars in taxpayer money, mostly in the form of …
Top Bank CEOs Express Contrition for Financial Crisis and Willingness to “Pay Their Fair Share” Washington, DC – On the eve of Tax Day, as millions of Americans are still struggling with hard times and worrying about how to pay the IRS, some of the most prominent players on Wall Street held a press conference …
Wall Street Titans Support Financial Speculation Tax Read More »
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is promising to unleash a cache of secret documents from the hard drive of a U.S. megabank executive. In 2009, he told Computer World that the bank was Bank of America (BofA). In 2010 he told Forbes that the information was significant enough to “take down a bank or two,” but that he needed time to lay out the information …
American taxpayers bailed out the big banks. Now many of those banks are returning the favor by extending credit to payday lenders who sucker consumers into a spiraling debt trap. That is the claim in a new report published this week by National People’s Action (NPA) the Chicago-based community organization. The report, called Preditors’ Creditors, names Wells Fargo, Bank of …
Bailed-Out Banks Finance Predatory Payday Lenders Read More »
Today, the Real Economy Project of CMD is introducing a new award we are fondly calling our “Golden Throne Award.” The Throne salutes the behind-the-scenes lobbyists and spinmeisters who have managed to maintain the status quo and hold off any meaningful reform of the financial services sector since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG rocked the world one year …
First “Golden Throne” Award Presented to Bank Lobbyist Extraordinaire Read More »
The good news on the Senate financial reform bill these days is that we have a few provisions worth fighting for. Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) has introduced one of the most important – a bold section in the Dodd bank reform bill (Section 716, colloquially known as 106) that will force the biggest banks to spin off …
Midnight Massacre Pending, Let’s Whip our Senators Read More »
William K. Black is an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. As a senior regulator at the former Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp, he played a critical role in the crack-down on savings and loan officials in the 1980s and 1990s and the unraveling of the …
