Interest groups spent $17.4 million for every day Congress was in session. Lobbying growth for finance sector and auto industry is smaller in tough times. WASHINGTON--While companies across the board were losing record amounts of money and laying off employees last year, at least one industry s...

Name: Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) Position: Frank will continue his role as chair of the House Financial Services Committee, which he undertook in 2007, just before the country's economy started to slip into a recession. The Democrat had been the ranking member of the committee, which has jurisdicti...

Why does my credit report list our mortgage as a Fannie Mae account? As part of the kickoff to the Year Of Paying Cash And Not Screwing Up (yay), I pulled our credit reports from Equifax tonight. We've had a conventional, 30-year mortgage with GMAC (no PMI) since 2003. In the comments under our GMAC...

Filed under: Federal Natl Mtge (FNM) What bothers me about last weekend's vague plan to bail out Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM ) and Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE ) is that it fails to solve the basic problem they face. The problem is that nobody is willing to put a hard number on what proportion of the mortgages ...

Filed under: After the bell, Exxon Mobil (XOM), Nokia Corp. (NOK), Merrill Lynch (MER), Federal Natl Mtge (FNM), Barrick Gold (ABX) If you thought holding a rally after a huge day was too much, you weren't too far off the mark. Many people ask over and over if this is a real bear market or not. By a...