Treasury Department
A Crazy Idea: Listen To The People Who Got It Right
A man who predicted our economic collapse offers new warnings about the current plans to fix it. Maybe we should listen to him this time.
January 26, 2009 | Read More
No Change Alert: Bailout Hank Hands Off To Bailout Tim
Obama’s choice for Treasury Secretary has a history of letting Wall Street run wild. And he represents “change we can believe in,” how exactly?
January 14, 2009 | Read More
Stimulus Overload, Part Two
The federal government and a chosen few corporations are siphoning up vast amounts of investment money. That isn’t exactly a stimulus.
January 7, 2009 | Read More
Paulson Goes Begging In Beijing
Hank Paulson is trying to convince our national bankers in China to use Wall Street’s financial services. You know, services like squandering your wealth and wrecking your economy.
December 2, 2008 | Read More
China Wins! ($585 Billion In I.O.U.’s)
It’s official. An authoritarian communist country is now our biggest, and most important, banker.
November 18, 2008 | Read More
Uncle Sam To GM: All I Got Is $25 Billion
Hank Paulson has apparently decided that General Motors - one of the biggest corporations on the planet, which employees 200,000 and provides health care and pensions to a million Americans - is not ‘too big too fail.’ But don’t feel too sorry for the behemoth multinational. It looks like Uncle Sam has found a way to toss a couple dozen billion its way after all.
November 3, 2008 | Read More
Banks’ Bailout Bonanza
After Hank Paulson opened up the vaults of the national treasury and made it rain on his beleaguered old buddies on Wall Street, he made a big show of restricting them from using the funds for those famously exorbitant retirement packages they like to give each other. But nobody said anything to them about not using the cash for things like takeovers, dividend payments, and bonuses.
November 1, 2008 | Read More
Is the Wall Street Bailout Really a Government Bailout?
Only a week after passing a state budget, California now says it needs $7 billion from the U.S. Treasury. The LA Times broke the story this morning when it “obtained” a letter from Governor Schwarzenegger to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. I’ll bet you twenty dollars against a truckload of Bear Stearns stock that Paulson leaked that letter to pressure dissident House members who are scheduled to re-vote on his $700 billion bailout. But isn’t this the ultimate Voodoo Economics? Sign a bill into law, buy up a few hundred billion in worthless bonds - ie: stick a pin in a doll and click the heels of your ruby slippers together - and suddenly, magically, funny money will start gushing onto the marketplace again.
October 3, 2008 | Read More
Reason #42: China and the Myth of Free Trade
Did you know that an authoritarian communist country is now keeping our supposedly capitalist economy afloat? No? Well, it’s true. And it’s scary as hell.
Politicians from both parties remind me of cult members sometimes, the way they mouth the mantra of “free trade” and parrot the conventional wisdom that globalization and more trade with fewer barriers is always a good thing. They treat “free trade” like it’s a religion. But like most religions, the free trade faith has an awful lot of myth in it.
Globalization has its benefits, for some at least. It makes many of our largest corporations boatloads of…
August 29, 2008 | Read More
Save the Dollar
If you’re thinking about taking a European vacation in the near future, you might want to reconsider your choice. A cup of coffee over there will cost you about eight bucks. A beer in a pub, more than $10, and in some places more like $15. That’s because the once-mighty dollar is in the toilet. At this point, it’s close to becoming the new peso. And with hundreds of billions of greenbacks flying overseas every year and the Treasury Department minting trillions in T-Bills to pay for the national debt and the Iraq War, it would take a miracle to raise…
August 27, 2008 | Read More
