Your "free" market at work for you: Merrill Lynch traders lost hundreds and hundreds of millions of profits on trades at extraordinary risk. Merrill hid word of those trades from its new parent company, Bank of America, and then paid $3.6 billion in bonuses based on performance as of December 8, 200...

A former Wall Street Journal writer explains how business reporters failed to report the run-up to the crisis, thus sacrificing any chance of us ultimately finding out exactly how the finance industry screwed us over. It's like a scene out of Fun with Dick and Jane : Contrast [the Security & Exc...

States and cities start jockeying to claim the largest amount of money released from Washington since LBJ after Barack Obama signs the stimulus bill into law on Tuesday. There will be obvious winners and losers: Officials expect that politics will not be limited to the lawmakers. Spending decisions ...

That's right: Democrats. Who again won the last election on the rising tide of voter indignation at corporate excess? Democrats, that's who. And now they're acting like losers....

The Center for Responsive Politics has the percentages of the huge public returns on lobbying dollars invested. In the meantime, Obama's rolled out a new bailout plan that seemed to fall flat.  The NY Times pointed out that it is already being criticized "for relying too heavily on the same vague s...

Obama's presumed tougher bailout bill looks like toothless Bush-lite at the NY Times: [A]s intended largely by Mr. Geithner, the plan stops short of intruding too significantly into bankers’ affairs even as they come onto the public dole ... Finally, while the administration will urge banks to inc...

This news just makes my taxpayer's blood boil. How in the hell can already bailed out Bank of America afford to pay "preferred" dividends (which get paid before stockholders get their dividends) while they are begging for billions more in bailout capital to subsidize their foolish purchase of Merril...

AIG has one of the largest airplane fleets among all the government bailed-out corporations: 7 planes a-pimping....

It appears that the academic field of economics is neither a hard nor an exact science: Some [economists] warned of a housing bubble, but almost none foresaw the resulting cataclysm. An entire field of experts dedicated to studying the behavior of markets failed to anticipate what may prove to be th...

John Sides suggests a correlation between the size of government's bailout payout to AIG and the fact that AIG spent more on lobbying than any other bailout recipient. Conversely, the company that spent the least on lobbying Congress, Lehman Brothers, received the lowest bailout payment. I don't hav...