bailout

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.

Did bailout money end up boosting Norm Coleman’s senatorial campaign? Hard to say, but damning new evidence unearthed by Huffington Post suggests that the former U.S. senator was heavily promoted by corporate opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act, including bailout recipient Bank of America Corp. On Oct. 17, three days after the financial institution [...]

Is Sen. Amy Klobuchar having bailout remorse? In a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr., on Thursday, Klobuchar called Paulson’s efforts a “failure” with a “massive transparency gap” and criticized Wall Street for not doing more to alleviate the credit crunch.
“I strongly believe that those financial institutions receiving federal aid through the TARP [...]

Thursday’s 52-35 Senate vote on a proposed $14 billion bailout for the auto industry broke down along party lines in Minnesota: Norm Coleman voted against it; Amy Klobuchar for it. The vote on the House version a day earlier: Minnesota Democrats approved, while GOPers Michele Bachmann, Jim Ramstad and John Kline voted against. Democratic Reps. [...]

The $14 billion bailout of the auto industry passed the U.S. House on Wednesday by 237 to 170, but the majority of Minnesota’s Congressional delegates voted against it. The bill will give loans to General Motors and Chrysler to aid them in continuing operations and staving off probable layoffs.
Democratic Reps. Betty McCollum and James Oberstar [...]

The House rejected a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street on Monday, sending the Dow plunging 777 points, and Republican leaders blamed a speech by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., for the rejection. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., roundly rejected that notion on Monday afternoon, having apparently left her talking points at home.

After the first subprime-related collapse of the market in August 2007, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke addressed the financial-services committee on September 20, 2007, to discuss subprime lending and the spate of foreclosures across the country. Of course, this was at least three years after subprime mortgages with ballooning rates were decimating families and neighborhoods: [...]

This week has been all about history-changing events: Washington is asking for the biggest bailout for Wall Street ever; a presidential candidate “suspended” his campaign because he’s too busy campaigning via TV interviews; and now, after the implosions of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual enters the [...]

The Sunlight Foundation has put together a fascinating animated graph that tracks the political donations from the finance, insurance and real estate sectors and to which party the money has gone. Utilizing Google Motion Chart and 20 years worth of data gathered by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, the chart seeks to demonstrate how [...]

Crisis got you down? Spend all of your home equity now! And take out another mortgage while you’re at it. Cash is king! A press release this week from the CMPS Institute, an organization responsible for training and certifying mortgage bankers and brokers, reveals the lengths the industry’s heavyweights will go to in order to get a sale and keep Americans in debt, even after it’s common knowledge that years of reckless practices brought us here today.