We just got over one of these, but here it comes again: The White House plans to ask Congress for an increase in the debt limit before the end of the week, according to a senior Treasury Department official. The debt limit is projected to fall within $100 billion of the current cap by December […]
Today is d-day, as in debt: The U.S. government is expected to hit the $14.294 trillion debt ceiling Monday, setting in motion an uncertain, 11-week political scramble to avoid a default. The Treasury Department plans to announce Monday it will stop issuing and reinvesting government securities in certain government pension plans, part of a series […]
Something we aren’t used to seeing; oversight of an administration, being conducted by the administration’s own party: A congressional oversight committee opened an investigation yesterday into whether the Obama administration is circumventing a law that limits lavish pay for executives at firms benefiting from the $700 billion federal bailout. Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), chairman of […]
Well under Bush it appears to have done just the opposite: The 20 largest banks that received government rescue funds slightly reduced their lending to consumers and businesses in the last three months of 2008, the government said Tuesday. The Treasury Department said the banks reduced their mortgage and business loans by a median of […]
When banks abuse their bailout funds, the Obama administration takes action: A Treasury Department official on Monday called Citigroup, which has received $45 billion in bailout capital from the government, to protest plans to accept delivery on a luxurious $50 million corporate jet made in France. [SNIP] The Treasury official called the bank to complain […]
That has been the mantra of the Bush administration and Republicans for year, and it was even included in the TARP: Congress wanted to guarantee that the $700 billion financial bailout would limit the eye-popping pay of Wall Street executives, so lawmakers included a mechanism for reviewing executive compensation and penalizing firms that break the […]
I can’t say that this comes as any shock: In the six weeks since lawmakers approved the Treasury’s massive bailout of financial firms, the government has poured money into the country’s largest banks, recruited smaller banks into the program and repeatedly widened its scope to cover yet other types of businesses, from insurers to consumer […]
Again – April Fool’s: The Iranian general who helped broker an end to nearly a week of fighting between Iraqi government forces and Shiite Muslim militiamen in southern Iraq is an unlikely peacemaker. Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, who helped U.S.-backed Iraqi leaders negotiate a deal with radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr to stop the […]
Dejavu all over: The Bush administration said Monday the only way to permanently fix Social Security is through some combination of benefit cuts and tax increases. That was one of the key findings in a new paper on Social Security released by the Treasury Department in an effort to achieve common ground on the politically […]
How long have we been talking about problems with voting machines now? Funny how when an election grows near that could cost the Republicans their control of Congress, the federal government now looks into them: In the debate about the reliability of electronic voting technology, the South Florida parent company of one of the nation’s […]