Crash Survival Zone

By William Greider

The most disturbing thing about Barack Obama’s call for financial reform was the way in which the president falsified our predicament. He tried to make it sound as though everyone was implicated in the financial breakdown and therefore no one was really to blame. “A culture of irresponsibility took root from Wall Street [...]

By Paul Krugman
Would the Obama administration’s plan for financial reform do what has to be done? Yes and no.
Yes, the plan would plug some big holes in regulation. But as described, it wouldn’t end the skewed incentives that made the current crisis inevitable.
Let’s start with the good news.
Our current system of financial regulation dates back [...]

by Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D.

While most pundits are still grasping at anecdotal “green shoots” to celebrate the beginning of a “recovery,” the hard data just released by the Federal Reserve reveals a continuing collapse of unprecedented dimensions.

It’s all in the Fed’s Flow of Funds Report for the first quarter of 2009, which I’ve posted on [...]

By Dave Lindorff

… While the Obama administration and the Treasury and the Fed are bulldozing funds into the coffers of the big banks, allegedly to get them to lend, the banks, from the largest to the smallest, are pulling back, afraid that borrowers will end up going bust on them. So much for economic stimulus [...]

Loan volume at the 21 largest recipients of government funding fell 7% during the month of April, according to a survey by the Treasury Department.

Lending at the nation’s top banks slowed in April, according to a government report published Monday, driven in part by continued deterioration in the U.S. economy.

The dollar amount of new loans [...]

By Samah El-Shahat

In my last column I introduced the idea that America’s handling of the financial crisis, and in particular the way it has refused to deal with the banks, is more in keeping with how an “emerging” economy might behave and act.

So this week, I will say that America has become a bank-owned state, [...]

Bailing out the big US banks has done nothing to improve them

by Joseph E. Stiglitz

With all the talk of “green shoots” of economic recovery, America’s banks are resisting efforts to regulate them. While politicians talk about their commitment to regulatory reform to prevent a recurrence of the crisis, this is one area where the devil [...]

When Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner unveiled the details of his plan to save America’s banks a little over two months ago, the markets raved, the country sighed with relief and Geithner went from punch line to potential hero overnight. Now the plan is in trouble, as parts of it struggle to get off the ground [...]

The Perils of Securitization

By Mike Whitney

Is it possible to make hundreds of billions of dollars in profits on securities that are backed by nothing more than cyber-entries into a loan book?

It’s not only possible; it’s been done. And now the scoundrels who cashed in on the swindle have lined up outside the Federal Reserve building [...]

BY Thomas F. Cooley

If a firm is ”too big to fail,” it is … too big.

There has been constant chatter about the fact that our regulatory institutions don’t really know how to deal with firms that are deemed “too big to fail” but may be insolvent. Throughout 2008, policymakers improvised a solution for each case [...]