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 …
oday 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 …
