Posts Tagged ‘Banks’
President Barack Obama gave a big speech yesterday. He was addressing the leaders of Wall Street and challenged them to join him in an effort to fix the problems that caused the financial crisis the world is facing today. The cartoon above addresses the same issue. The cartoonist thinks that this is a burning issue.What do you think?
Thanks to Wikicommons.
Question: Do you remember that recent financial crisis that was going to (play scary music) DESTROY THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT!?! (in case you don’t… crawl out from under your rock and check out US Democrazy’s past coverage).
Fortunately for us, politicians everywhere agreed to do everything possible to ensure that such a crisis did not happen again.
Unfortunately, these politicians cannot seem to agree on… what exactly “everything possible” means…
Like everything in Washington these days, reform of the financial and banking industry (which helped create the almighty mess we are stuck in) is in a partisan deadlock.
There was some progress made in 2009 when the House of Representatives passed a financial reform bill last December.
Since then, that bill has languished in the clutches of the US Senate (an organization about as fast as molasses up hill in January).
But HARK! (play triumphant music) all that is about to change! A Senate version of the bill may be emerging! …read more.
Got Ya’…Iraqi officials uncover plot to bomb government ministries.
Got You Too… FDIC advances a proposal to penalize banks for risky practices.
I feel like I’m forgetting something…
Florida Grandmother Forgotten in Jail for 15 Days
If we at USDemocrazy want to see a good cat fight, we turn on Animal Planet.
Last Sunday, we saw TV cat fights involving lions, tigers and even President Obama!
That’s right, on Sunday President Obama had his catty claws out. In an interview he referred to America’s Wall Street bankers as a bunch of “fat cats”.
To make the name calling worse, it was only a day before Mr. Obama was scheduled to meet with these very same top bankers.
What was this meeting about (clearly not another friendly beer summit)? …read more.
Jay Leno says he’s not out to save NBC… “Uh, what?” says NBC back…
The U.S. is all about new beginnings. And making mortgage lenders work, too.
Lesson learned: cold, hard cash is best not kept in the freezer. (Any old police office with the muchies is going to look there.)
Thanks to Wikicommons.
***UPDATE: Here are the Official Results***
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has been under a lot of stress lately. (We at USDemocrazy thinks it has something to do with fixing the tanking economy.) Now it seems he has been passing this stress onto others.
The US Treasury has required major banks to undergo “Stress Tests” (like waiting in line at the DMV) to see if they are financially sturdy enough (i.e. have enough money) to stand on their own two feet without government crutches.
The results are in… sort of…
The Feds will not be releasing the official results until later today. Luckily, there have been a number of leaks to the press.
Geithner has announced the results will be “reassuring” … although anythingother than total disaster might seem reassuring in this economic climate.
Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Regional Financial, Sun Trust, KeyCorp, Morgan Stanley, Fifth Third, P.N.C. and GMAC need more money. No surprises here.
Among those banks tough enough to survive are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, MetLife, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of New York Mellon, and American Express. (You can now open the champagne and charge it to your AmEx card.)
What happens to those stressed out banks? Does the government issue Valium?
Well, it seems the banks get one month to put a plan together for raising cash.
Once the banks get their stress report cards, the pundit class will weigh in with their interpretation of the grades. The NY Times has a great collection of experts giving their two cents worth. Arianna Huffington is as vocal as ever with her opinion,
“The fact that the stress test results to be released on Thursday are unlikely to show the full extent of the sickness of our financial system is one more symptom that Obama’s economic team needs to be put in quarantine…”
We’ll see down the road how accurate these tests were. So what do y’all think? Are you and the banks stressed enough?
Hey amigo, where’d ya get that gun… From the US!
What’s the prognosis, doc? Some stocks with a side of t-bonds.
Ron Paul meets Sacha Baron Cohen.
I was expecting an interview on Austrian economics. So, that didn’t turn out that way. But, by the time he started pulling his pants down, I … What in (inaudible) is going on here? I ran out of the room.
