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Commercial banks and savings institutions insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) reported an aggregate profit of $35.3 billion in the third quarter of 2011, an $11.5 billion improvement from the $23.8 billion in net…

The GAO says that issues with the TARP are not “material” and chooses instead to go with the less damning term of “significant”. A three-year record of getting it wrong would seem to suggest otherwise. We get that the $470 billion TARP was…

It’s been almost three years to the day since AIG was bailed out. And guess what? AIG still owes taxpayers $49.4 BILLION! That’s more than half the budget of the Department of Education. What was that about taxpayers getting their money…

The EZ crisis is approaching a tipping point beyond which market panic and slow government reaction threaten to create a generation-defining loss of jobs, savings, and pensions. This open letter to the president of the German central bank…

And just two days after I reported on the starve-the-beast strategy that’s forcing the SEC to pursue Mickey-Mouse settlements with the big banks, we learn of plans to handicap the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission in a similar…

Andrew Haldane, in my opinion, generally has the right idea about banks and their risks, which are risks not just “to themselves” but to all of society and the global economy. Yet here Haldane’s endorsing the sort of sleight of hand that…

German central bankers (current and former) continue to voice their hostility to what the financial community now calls a Euro-style Quantitative Easing (aka big bazooka). This talk (by one of the boldest opponents of an ECB solution to the…

The Finance Addict writes : "We need to put our cynic hats on and start questioning why it is that the SEC isn’t getting any. My guess–it’s no accident."

For all practical purposes the Fed has done it all. And yet unemployment remains at depression levels of over 9% (and over 16% the way it used to be calculated not long ago) and the only thing keeping what’s called ‘inflation’ over 1% is a…

Politicians, Treasury Secretaries, etc. would have you believe that “moral hazard” is something we should only worry about in the abstract, in the future, when they’ve moved on to another job. But now a study confirms with hard facts: moral…