AIG

Here’s an enigma for Easter Sunday. The popular Paas brand egg-dyeing kits advertise their contents as including nine (or sometimes a dozen) “silly circles” and the same number of “egg holders.” The circles are punch-outs from the back of the kit box. The egg holders are the holes created when you punch out the circles. Selling consumers on [...]

Minneapolis’ own Prince is pulling lyrics from the headlines again, particularly in a new song he performed on Jay Leno’s TV show last week. “Ol’ Skool Company” references America’s financial bailouts, with a local angle: “Fat cats on Wall Street, they got a bailout, think it was the AIG — $700 billion — but my [...]

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann may have started it last fall with loopy comments on national TV about her congressional colleagues’ “anti-American” views. Last week, she again tried to “out” fellow lawmakers, this time for supporting AIG’s bonuses, while a widely quoted (but anonymous) banker termed the U.S. House of Representatives’ bonus tax “anti-American” — helping [...]

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann — famous for urging the media to expose anti-Americans in Congress – did her own probing today, pressing AIG CEO Edward Liddy for names of her colleagues who had foreknowledge of AIG’s controversial bonus payments. “Did any members of Congress know anything about the bonuses?” asked Bachmann. Yes, Liddy responded – 

AIG CEO Edward Liddy told the U.S. House Financial Services Committee that he has asked AIG executives who got bonuses “to return at least half of those payments.” Some want to return 100 percent, he said. C-SPAN3 is streaming the hearing in live video.

U.S. Reps. Erik Paulsen, R-Minn., and Leonard Lance, R-N.J., are among the lowliest members of the House Financial Services Committee. Yet some politically astute casting elevated the freshmen to GOP point men in response to the AIG bonus scandal. The pair are among that rarest of species in Congress: newly elected Republicans from districts that favored Barack Obama for president.

Americans’ anger over AIG’s publicly funded executive bonuses may make this the last “Why are we not rioting?” post. First, one more observer remarks on the stateside calm, blaming low levels of unionization while seeing sparks of resistance in hundreds of homeowners picketing a mortgage financier’s Connecticut home. But there’s union help in spreading the word about anti-AIG-themed economic [...]

During the 2008 cycle, Sen. Norm Coleman has received three and a half times more in campaign contributions than Al Franken from interests in the so-called FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) sector at the heart of the continuing financial crisis–and over twice as much from the principal players in this week’s Wall Street drama.

The Federal Reserve announced Tuesday evening that it’s giving American International Group an $85 billion loan to bail out the multinational quasi-insurance and investment corporation after the company traded in unregulated credit default swaps and other risky ventures and landed at the doorstep of default. How much would that $85 billion in corporate welfare be worth to those who truly need a safety net?

After Monday’s dramatic tumble in the financial markets–led by dire announcements about Lehman Brothers (bound for bankruptcy court), Merrill Lynch (absorbed by Bank of America) and insurance giant AIG (desperately seeking bridge loans)–I got in touch with Doug Henwood for some help in sorting out these latest developments and what they augur for the US economy on Main Street.

In a 20-minute interview taped Tuesday afternoon, Henwood–the publisher of the invaluable Left Business Observer newsletter and perhaps our most plainspoken economics journalist–took the measure of “Gray Monday” and the arc of the US economy.