Federal Reserve

The latest political clamor over AIG, poised to combust next Wednesday at a House hearing on backdoor payments to banks that made risky deals with the company, centers on the Federal Reserve’s effort to conceal details of those payments. But senior officials, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, have so far evaded a key question: Why were AIG’s trading partners fully paid with taxpayer money instead of being told to take a loss?

Credit card holders hit with arbitrary interest rate hikes in recent months might be stuck with the extra burden, despite the high-profile congressional effort this year to protect consumers from such increases.

It sounds like a question on a StatShot chart from The Onion: Why are we not rioting? But AlterNet’s Joshua Holland seriously probes why people in Europe and developing countries are taking to the streets to protest the global economic collapse — while Americans, who started it, are not.

In the last couple weeks, I’ve tried to extract extra political meaning out of all sorts of stuff — Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s growing back his mullet (for a presidential run in 2012?), Al Franken’s traveling to D.C. (to cast a provisional ballot against U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman’s committee chairmanship?), and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak’s playing with [...]

Bloomberg News reports that the Federal Reserve Bank is “refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.” Reporters Mark Pittman, Bob Ivry and Alison Fitzgerald add that Bloomberg has tried to obtain the information through a Freedom [...]

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.