Just over half of the ‘Phants voted against it, and all but 6 Democrats (I’ll post who and what should be done later) voted for a 90% tax on bonuses of companies getting bailed out by the government.
On some level I understand just how this is really a very small part of the bailout, but from news, to outrage, to bill passing the house is about 4 days, and it means something, though I’m not sure who gets that yet.
I think that Geithner will be gone by June….He should have rented a house, because we now have a report that Treasury was informed of the bonuses two weeks before Geithner says that he knew, which makes him either a liar, or incompetent.
Me, I’ll go with liar, as it is clear that the Obama administration is lying their asses off about Dodd’s role in proposed bonus restrictions in the bailout legislation, and the logical people lying about it right now are all on the Geithner/Summers “axis of weasels”:
After the recent furor relating to the AIG payments, lawmakers returned to make a forensic examination of the provision seeking to assign blame for what some called a secret agreement to spare the tottering insurance giant, which has received more than $170 billion in federal aid. The provision and its genesis consumed Capital Hill Wednesday.
“The president goes out and says this is not acceptable and then some backroom deal gets cut to let these things get paid out anyway,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, (D., Ore.), author of an earlier, alternative pay amendment, told the Associated Press.
The Obama administration had not tried to hide its concern about the moves to clamp down on executive compensation. Both Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers lobbied Mr. Dodd to make changes.
Administration officials said the Treasury didn’t suggest any language or say how the amendment should be changed. They said they noted legal issues that could likely lead to challenges, but was the end of their involvement. The official said Mr. Dodd and Congress made the final changes on their own.
At issue were competing provisions in the stimulus bill that capped executive compensation for recipients of bailout funds. One, drafted by Sens. Wyden and Olympia J. Snowe (R, Maine), would have capped bonuses at $100,000, retroactive to 2008. Companies awarding bonuses above that level would face the choice of returning those funds to the Treasury or having them taxed at 35%.
“Administration Officials” means someone under Geithner’s or Summers’ control here.
What’s more, the rest of the world does not have any confidence in Geithner either, as evidenced by the IMF criticizing his plan as “lacking detail.”
The IMF never criticizes a Secretary of the Treasury, and the fact that they are now indicates that there are a number of foreign nations that are sick of him, and signed off on this statement.
We need someone who will hold the financial industry to account, and Geithner still has knee pads on.
Word is that Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher has been tapped as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, which means that the head of the New Democrat Caucus, and a shill for the banking industry would be replaced in a special election.
The fact that this DINO in a safe Dem district would be out would be a very good thing.
Al Franken has filed paperwork with the election court for the Coleman campaign to reimburse them for court costs.
Seeing how Coleman has raised more money for his court challenge than he did for his campaign, I would really like to see the smarmy bastard soaked.
For once, I agree with Senator Jim Grassley (R-IA):
The first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them (is) if they’d follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.
He later backed off his suicide comment, which was an exaggeration for the purpose of emphasis, but “Have you no shame,” has already been said about Joseph McCarthy.
Still, I thought that it was funny.
One of the better Congressional freshmen is Alan Grayson (D-FL), and he is now using the term amputate with regard to AIG:
Grayson joined fellow Democrats as well as Republicans in blasting AIG for its refusal to give up hundreds of millions of dollars in bonus payments. He painted the government’s choice as a stark one, using the metaphor of treating a wound versus amputating a limb.
“It’s not clear to me at all that we’re taking the correct approach by allowing AIG to continue to operate, regardless of who owns it,” Grayson told me. “At this point, ownership is becoming an amorphous concern when comes to a company that borrows millions and millions without any prospect of paying it back. … Do we continue to allow the bleeding or not?”
Note that I am not suggesting that the distinguished gentleman from Florida reads my blog, merely that my suggestion of amputating diseased banks is something that other people are coming to independently.
The banking system has more than zombie banks. It has gangrenous limbs that will continue to poison the rest of the body until removed.
Signs of the Apocalypse, I Agree With Paul La Monica, who I generally find trite and relentlessly upbeat, when he says that mark to market is not a problem, but rather that the problem is that the banks made sh$% loans and created sh%$ derivatives, and did not hold enough capital.
That being said, he is not as inventive in his lede as David Reilly, who says that, “Elvis Lives, and Mark-to-Market Rules Fuel Crisis,” and notes that even now, only a fraction of the big sh$%pile is marked to market:
Of the $8.46 trillion in assets held by the 12 largest banks in the KBW Bank Index, only 29 percent is marked to market prices, according to my analysis of company data. General Electric Co., meanwhile, said last week that just 2 percent of assets were marked to market at its General Electric Capital Corp. subsidiary, which is similar in size to the sixth-biggest U.S. bank.
What are all those other assets that aren’t marked to market prices? Mostly loans — to homeowners, businesses and consumers.
Loans are held at their original cost, minus a reserve that banks create for potential future losses. Their value doesn’t fall in lockstep with drops in market prices.
Yet these loans still produce losses, thanks to the housing meltdown and recession. In fact, bank losses on unmarked loans are typically bigger than mark-to-market losses on securities like bonds backed by mortgages.
They both make the point that mark to model to a large created this crisis, by encouraging banks to create risky pieces of crap that no one wants to buy, though this reality is not preventing Congress from pressuring regulators to relax the rules on mark-to-market.
This stuff is worth pennies on the dollars, and the banks are insolvent. Let’s recognize reality and move on.
Well, it looks like I was premature about Franken resting his case.
They have a few more witnesses who could not make it to court yesterday, so they should wrap today.
Thank God! It looks like the Minnesota Senate contest is finally in the end game.
Hopefully, the election judges can rule shortly, though since the ‘Phants are paying Coleman lots of money to string this out, I would be surprised if Al Franken is sworn in before the end of March.
The vote was 234-191 to give bankruptcy judges to right to modify mortgages on primary residences in bankruptcy.
Not only will this help bankrupt home owners, but it gives other folks a stick to bring their banks to the table.
Happy dance.
And considering how moderates have deserted the party, I would expect Pat Toomey to beat him this time, as last time the margin in the primary was less than 1%.
Thankfully, I do not think that Toomey can win the general election though….Though Pennsylvania did give us Rick “that frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex” Santorum.
Scary Pix Courtesy of Barron’s Econoday
So the unemployment rate jumped ½% in February, from 7.6% to 8.1%. and 651,000 jobs were lost.
Additionally, U6, the broadest measure of un and under employment is at 14.8%, and note that U6 is the statistic closest to the 20+% unemployment rates recorded in the great depression.
….
Delightful.
If that weren’t bad enough, 20% of all mortgaged properties are under water, and something around 1 in 9 mortgages are either in foreclosure or delinquent, so any turn around in residential real estate is are greatly exaggerated.
It also looks like the FDIC is asking Congress to lend it $500 billion, because its insurance fund is depleted.
We do have Baltic Dry Index, a measure of the demand for cargo shipping, one piece of good news, in that the just hit its highest level this year, which indicates more international trade.
Meanwhile, the jump in unemployment has driven the dollar down, and oil up.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has proposed a bill making it illegal, which is nice, but I don’t see the word “felony”.
In reviewing the full text of the bill it appears to be just a fine, though I guess a perjury prosecution could be possible too, if you can show truly malicious intent.
They will testify under oath regarding the U.S. Attorney Firings, though it will be in closed session.
Here’s hoping for some leaks.
I knew that there were some proposals kicking around, but the idea has become mainstream enough that New York Stock Eexchange CEO Duncan Niederauer has gone public with his opposition.
It appears that Rep. Peter DeFasio’s (D-0R-4) proposal for a ¼% transaction tax on stocks and derivatives, in part to fund the bailout of the banking industry.
It’s a very good idea. ¼% is inconsequential to long term investors, but to speculator types, such as day traders, it makes their business model, and the problems that they bring, much less sustainable.
It exists in most of the rest of the world, and (IIRC) existed in the US until some point in the 1960s, so it’s not the end of the world that these folks forsee, though it might cut down a bit on their commissions from churning clients investments.
It’s still better than nothing, but Ellen Tauscher desperately needs to be primaried.
Here. Word is that he is the 2nd best guy running, after Tom Geoghegan.
He was endorsed by the Tribune, which is probably why he won.
He does not appear to be a part of Mayor Richie Daley’s machine, but I think that this will result in a primary challenge in 2010, not support of his opponent in the special general election.
Rod Blagojevich gift that keeps on giving, Roland Burris, has launched a web site dedicated to his reelection.
Great googley moogley, please make it stop.
Roland Burris not only thinks that he can win a primary, but that he can win a general, but at this point, I think that Dick Cheney is more likely than he is to win a state wide election in the state of Illinois.
*I mean this in the meaning of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
Less offensive words have been created in the many languages of the galaxy, such as joojooflop, swut and Holy Zarquon’s Singing Fish.
The use of bad language can have unforseen circumstances. One example is the war between the G’gugvunts and the Vl’hurgs, caused by a casual remark made by Arthur Dent being mistaken as a terrible insult.
Simultaneous Babel Fish translation also means that any being can be rude to any other being without the need for extensive explanations. This has also started many wars.
The reason the Earth has been shunned for so long is also due to a language problem. On Earth, Belgium refers to a small country. Throughout the rest of the galaxy, Belgium is the most unspeakably rude word there is.†
†Rumor has it that this came from Douglas Adams’ experience hitchhiking across Europe. He got where he needed to generally, but not in Belgium, so he had to walk across the whole country.
It’s an open secret that the Republicans do not want Jim Bunning to run for reelection in 2010, and it appears that the former hall of fame pitcher has said in private conversations that he will quit the Senate and allow Democratic Governor Steve Beshear to appoint his successor if the party establishment tries to push him out.
If he quits, with or without Franken, and with or without a successor, the Dems have cloture without a single Republican vote.
Heh.
They are proposing the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act, which is intended to add some teeth to the 1983 Nunn–McCurdy Amendment.
Nunn–McCurdy requires congressional notice when a program goes 15% over budget, and termination when it goes 25% over budget, unless the DoD certifies it as “essential to the national security,” but this has come to mean very little, as evidenced by the F-22, DDG-1000, FCS, JSF, EFV, LCS, etc.
According to Senator Carl Levin, the measure includes:
What is interesting here is that this is juxtaposed with the appointment of Ashton B. Carter as Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition.
Carter is a Harvard professor, and has no ties to the defense industry. His career has largely involved criticizing the defense industry while at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and he served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy under Clinton.
The Iron Triangle types do not like him, which means that I do, though I hope that he has the bureaucratic chops to make this work.