Links: 2009-09-30

"The government secretly tried to orchestrate a deal involving Goldman Sachs in the week following Lehman Brothers’ collapse and considered using the Federal Reserve to help support such a transaction, Andrew Ross Sorkin reports in the new issue of Vanity Fair."

Obama needs to demonstrate more leadership on core issues like financial reform.

Hank Paulson and Lloyd Blankfein spoke a lot more than is prudent

"BNP Paribas SA, France’s largest bank by market value, said it will buy back the stake taken by France in the midst of the global financial crisis early this year, becoming the first European bank to repay a government."

"There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery’s version of the Barack Obama "Hope" poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obama’s Washington was not supposed to be the lobbyists’ Washington, the place we learned to despise during the last administration."

"Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who has presided over a doubling of the Kremlin’s ownership of big business, on Tuesday signaled a return to more private ownership as the country faces its first budget deficit in a decade."

"The setback in Angola — China’s largest African partner — is in stark contrast with the enthusiastic reception it found there five years ago, when China was launching a quest for African resources to feed its economic boom. It made a spate of resource acquisitions in the form of oil-for-infrastructure deals."

New Labour is dead, Long live populism. Brown realizes he must fight the resurgent Tories. Will it be enough? No.

"At least 99 people were killed and dozens left missing by the tsunami, which inundated tourist resorts and local villages after a massive 8.0-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Samoa early Tuesday morning local time. Disaster authorities warned the death toll could rise significantly over the next few days as the full scale of the disaster – much of which occurred in remote areas – is assessed."

"State tax revenues in the second quarter plunged 17% from a year earlier as rising unemployment and reduced spending hurt sales- and income-tax collections, according to Census Bureau figures released Tuesday. The decline was the sharpest since at least the 1960s. The biggest drop among major revenue sources was in state income taxes, which were down 28% from a year ago. Sales-tax revenues fell 9%."

"The government said the fund that protects consumer bank deposits has fallen into the red and will remain there into 2012, a pointed symbol of how the aftershocks of the financial crisis will reverberate for years as banks continue to fail at a high rate."

"A bipartisan Senate vote swept aside demands by liberal Democrats for a government-run health insurance plan, delivering a potentially lethal blow to the most controversial measure of the proposed U.S. health-care overhaul."

Paying for anti-virus software will soon be a thing of the past.

Google looks to protect its copyright on the Android-based phone