Associated Press reports that 21 banks that received funds from the Troubled Assets Relief Program aren’t talking about what they’ve done with the money. No wonder this headline seems so plausible…

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Yesterday I was talking to some folks about whether, given the trillions potentially committed to bailouts, there’s any sense in continuing to probe earmarks. I say of course there is.
Our friends at the Center for Responsive Politics put together a handy guide to the political influence wielded by Bernard L. Madoff, who was arrested [...]

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Reading the restructuring plan that General Motors put together makes me wonder whether, in a broad sense, there isn’t an insuperable conflict of interest between members of Congress and the automakers. Consider just one aspect of GM’s plan:
…the number of GM retailers is expected to decline to 4,700 by 2012. This will occur primarily in [...]

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It’s old news now: yesterday, President-elect Barack Obama announced he was picking Timothy Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as his Treasury Secretary.
Geithner’s New York Fed, according to Bloomberg.com, has been “accepting [securities from banks] on behalf of American taxpayers as collateral for $1.5 trillion of loans. (Bear in [...]

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It appears that the auto bailout is stalled for now, as congressional leadership and the Bush administration have come to loggerheads over providing $25 to $50 billion in loans to General Motors, Ford Motor Company, and Chrysler.
I found it interesting that, as of December 2007 (the most recent date for which disclosures are available), just [...]

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In late July this year, two North Carolina state legislators and a pharmaceutical industry executive set up a political non-profit to run ads focusing on the present financial crisis ahead of the November election. The nonprofit has spent more than $600,000 to produce the ads, according to documents filed with the Federal [...]

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Details here, vote tallies here.
But does the bailout bill even address the underlying conditions that caused the crisis? Via InstaPundit comes this measured analysis of what went wrong that caused the need for the bailout:
Note that Mr. Paulson’s proposal was not intended to solve the teaser-rate mortgage problem, either now or in the future. In [...]

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When I read accounts like this, I’m not surprised that Congress has such low approval ratings:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., pressed for passage, with the alarming news that one of the country’s premier insurance companies was about to go bankrupt if the crisis was not quickly resolved.
“We don’t have a lot of leeway on [...]

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This is largely gratuitous, but while tooling around Fannie Mae’s Web site, I came across their Employee Code of Conduct, revised in 2007. The opening includes this passage:
But in many situations the right course of action is not always obvious. So here are some questions that we can ask ourselves to help us navigate the [...]

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The Hill reports that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are dissolving their formidable lobbying operations (when the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight was investigating their shady accounting practices, Fannie Mae was spending $8 million a year on lobbyists, some of whom were working with Congress to derail the investigation).
The Hill reports,
When the two [...]

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