But hey, look over there! Ben Bernanke's the Man of the Year!

WASHINGTON — The value of loans held by the biggest beneficiaries of the government's bank bailout fell for the ninth consecutive month in October, the Treasury Department reported Tuesday, a day after President Barack Obama criticized top bankers for not doing enough to boost lending.

The department's monthly report, which monitors the top 22 recipients of support from the government's $700 billion rescue fund, showed that their average loan balances dropped in October by $36.8 billion, or 0.9 percent. That followed a decline of 1.1 percent, or $45.9 billion, in September.

Obama on Monday urged the nation's big banks to make "extraordinary" efforts to increase lending to help consumers and businesses who have been staggered by the worst recession since the 1930s.

It sounds like a really good idea. But really, this is bribery. And it wouldn't have been necessary to give them everything they want if Geithner and pals put reasonable conditions on the bank bailout in the first place:

The Obama administration is developing a major initiative to tackle the economic and political problem of unemployment by getting federal bailout funds into the hands of small businesses.

The proposal involves spinning off a new entity from the Troubled Assets Relief Program that could give banks access to the government money without restrictions, such as limits on executive pay, as long as they use it to make loans to small businesses. But officials are not yet certain whether carving the program out of TARP would be the best way to lure banks to participate in small-business lending, said sources familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plans were not final.

As an alternative, officials are prepared to ask Congress to modify TARP itself, easing the pay limits and other restrictions that would be imposed on small-business lenders taking the money, the sources said.

Since the summer, the administration has been facing an uncomfortable dynamic in the economy. The ranks of the jobless have been growing, while big financial firms that got taxpayer bailout money have been thriving. In response, officials have been trying to recast TARP as aid for Main Street rather than Wall Street.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told a congressional oversight panel Thursday that TARP would focus on aiding small-business lending, community banks and homeowners struggling to keep up with their mortgage payments, and he hinted at the new program.

Banks are "very reluctant to come and do business with the government and they're concerned that, if they come, they will be stigmatized and they will be subject to the risk of conditions in the future that might make it harder for them to run their businesses," Geithner told the TARP oversight panel. Solving that problem, he added, is "going to be something we cannot do on our own. It's going to require some help from Congress to help deal with those basic concerns."

Elizabeth Warren, who heads the oversight panel, chided Geithner for taking so long in setting up several other small-business lending initiatives, two of which were announced last spring.

"It's not news to anyone that small-business lending is important," she said. "Small businesses are closing every day. But Treasury has now announced three plans and clearly has not gotten the job done."

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CNN's Jessica Yellin talks to TARP Congressional Oversight Chair Elizabeth Warren about the details of her report about to be released to Congress. Warren stressed the need to get legislation passed to give the government resolution authority over these "too-big-to-fail" institutions so the taxpayers aren't put on the hook again when they "mess up". That's a kind way to put it, but she's right.

You've gotta' love Jessica Yellin asking if it's "un-American" to regulate these industries. Unbelievable. I've got to wonder just how much more out of control she thinks they should be allowed to get before it's "American" to do something about it.

YELLIN: Well, the white house plan is just the latest controversy over T.A.R.P. the Congressional oversight committee is about to release a December report, a detailed review of T.A.R.P. to date. Elizabeth Warren is the chair of the T.A.R.P. Congressional oversight committee and joins me now from Washington.

Elizabeth, so good to see you again. The bailout, we know, was unpopular, as the president acknowledged today. But I remember a year ago, the prognosticators were warning of economic calamity. People certainly are hurting today, more than 60 million unemployed. But a second great Congressional didn't happen. So could we argue that the bailout actually worked?

WARREN: Absolutely. One of the things that we conclude in our report, which will be out tomorrow, is that the bailout was part of a larger, strong government response that probably kept this economy from tumbling over the abyss. So in that sense, we have to admit T.A.R.P. did its job. Now, T.A.R.P. was also supposed to do a lot of other things and we should also evaluate along those metrics. But for the number one thing, that is stop the crisis and stop that feeling that it's all tumbling into depression, it did it.

YELLIN: All right. Let's talk about some of the other things. It was supposed to unfreeze credit and make sure credit was flowing. It was supposed to help keep jobs and businesses from laying off employees. It was supposed to help homeowners in some way through a trickle-down effect to keep their homes. How well has it scored on some of those measures?

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You know, between the crooks, the politicians and the payoffs, this issue shouldn't be a third rail anymore. Democrats need to decide which we can afford: Shoveling trillions of dollars into the military-industrial-congressional complex (and the pockets of defense donors), or rebuilding this country's economic and social infrastructure. David Sirota:

In 2000, the Pentagon admitted it has lost -- yes, lost -- $2.3 trillion. In 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a subsequent Department of Defense study said it was only $1 trillion. To put such numbers in perspective, contemplate what those sums could finance. $1 trillion, for instance, could pay the total cost of universal healthcare for the long haul. $2.3 trillion would cover universal healthcare plus the bank bailout plus the stimulus package.

Obviously -- obviously! -- these points are no cause for alarm and certainly no cause for defense spending reductions, right? All they must prove is that the archconservative Cato Institute, William Randolph Hearst's newspaper chain, National Journal employees and Pentagon officials are secretly America-hating liberals. And -- obviously! -- so are two of the most aggressive neoconservative hawks ever to hold government office, Sen. John McCain and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. After all, they’re the ones who issued those scathing statements about wasteful defense spending in the pop quiz above. That means they’re actually terrorist-appeasing lefties, right?

Really, how could anyone other than traitorous communists see the data and then consider backing the mildest Pentagon spending cuts? I mean, come on -- in a country whose paranoid conservative movement now makes a dead-serious ideology out of Stephen Colbert wisecracks, how dare any red-blooded American even think of pondering basic budgetary facts?

Of course here's a typical conservative reaction:

Lost in all the typical liberal hyperventilating over increased defense spending during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is just how low current defense spending compared to the last 45 years.

Oh, well then! Quit yer griping!

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November 19, 2009 MSNBC
Naomi Klein and Ryan Grimm explain to Dylan Ratigan why we need to audit the Federal Reserve.

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From MSNBC, Norah O'Donnell stumps a Palin supporter who is not aware that McCain and Palin supported the bank bailouts during the presidential campaign.

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November 13, 2009 MSNBC
Dylan Ratigan pushes his "Space Agenda"
GO DYLAN!

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October 26, 2009 C-SPAN

Kaptur: The New York Times today reported "As Wall Street has returned to business as usual, industry power has become even more concentrated among relatively few firms". A handful of mammoth banks have brought our nation, our credit system and our economy to its knees. Some call them too big to fail. One must ask why should a few big players have so much power. They can force tax payer bailouts for themselves, shut off credit and hold the reigns of our economy in their hands. A handful of firms are gobbling up our money, killing off smaller banks and institutions. Congress and this administration are just letting them do it.

My friends, such concentration of financial power is dangerous to our country. A few Wall Street firms are on the fast track to controlling all banking in this country. Rather than address this by breaking up these banks some in Washington say they just want to regulate them better. If you believe that, you haven't paid any attention over this last year. The biggest banks are getting bigger.

Fortune Magazine: Big banks take your money and run

A river of cash has flowed into the biggest banks over the past year. But for borrowers, it has been more of a meandering stream.

Deposits at the top five bank holding companies soared 29% in the year ended June 30, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Yet only one of those banks -- PNC (PNC, Fortune 500) of Pittsburgh -- boosted its lending by the same magnitude, according to midyear data from regulatory filings.

At Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500), JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500) and Wells Fargo (WFC, Fortune 500), loan growth trailed deposit growth by a wide margin.

And Citigroup (C, Fortune 500), the bank that has received the most federal aid since the market meltdown of September 2008, reported a decrease in lending despite an increasing pool of deposits.

All told, the five biggest deposit-taking banks added $852 billion in core deposits over the past year -- essentially checking and savings accounts of less than $100,000.

Over the same period, their loan portfolios rose by just $564 billion.

This is noteworthy because these five banks received more than $100 billion in direct taxpayer assistance via the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) -- a program that was set up to replenish the depleted capital levels of banks and allow them to boost lending to consumers and small businesses.

Some fear the lending gap could hamper chances of an economic recovery.

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From Charlie Rose on PBS, Andrew Ross Sorkin discusses his new book Too Big to Fail. I highly recommend watching the entire interview if you've got an hour to spare. Wall Street has not learned their lessons even after as Sorkin puts it "they saw the world was about to fall off of its axis".

Watch the full interview here. Transcript here.

ANDREW SORKIN: And part of the thing that’s so interesting about them is they really were thinking ahead. It’s remarkable, at least to me, a board meeting in
Moscow in June -- not in September, in June -- where they are talking...

CHARLIE ROSE: Goldman Sachs.

ANDREW SORKIN: A Goldman Sachs board meeting where they were talking about whether they need to become a bank holding company. Do they need deposits?

At one point they talk about whether they should buy -- are you ready for this -- AIG for the deposits, because they’re thinking if the future keeps going this direction where you need deposits and you need to be the equivalent of a bank holding company, maybe we should buy a company like that. Obviously it doesn’t go anywhere.

CHARLIE ROSE: Is there anything wrong with the fact that when AIG got all that TARP money they had to -- they paid out about $12, $13 billion to Goldman Sachs as a counterpart.

ANDREW SORKIN: I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time asking that question and tracing those two days. And I hope when you read it you really get to feel like you’re there and understand and appreciate what was going on.

And just to give it a little perspective, it really had happened now 24 hours after Lehman and Merrill had gone down, or Merrill had been sold to Bank of America.

The decision to give AIG $85 billion happened in the course of -- the first meeting was 8:00 a.m. Tuesday morning and by noon they decided to do it.

CHARLIE ROSE: Why did they do it?

ANDREW SORKIN: I think they saw the world was about to fall off of its axis. And, in fact, probably -- we were really quite close. And that would have been a very difficult decision.

Now, what they didn’t do was sit around the table, the conversation that we’ve had since then and say "Do you really need to pay out the full amounts to these banks? Could we give them a hair cut?"

CHARLIE ROSE: It was what, $40, $50 million?

ANDREW SORKIN: An extraordinary amount of money to banks throughout the world. And what if we’d gone into restructuring and said we’re not going to give you all this money? They didn’t have time to do that. They never really thought through that process. That never came up.

I mean, the funny and sad part about this entire book is many of the conversations -- the time, the amount of time that they are talking and thinking about these issues are much shorter than the amount of time we’ve been sitting and talking around this table now.

CHARLIE ROSE: How do you explain? Because they didn’t have time?

ANDREW SORKIN: There was no time. They were moving from meeting to meeting. They were running. They were racing. It really is -- it’s not a marathon, it’s a sprint. And they’re running out of their minds.

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October 14, 2009 C-SPAN
On the floor of the House Congresswoman Kaptur borrows from Charles Dickens to explain the situation we now find ourselves in. "The Banks Privatize Their Profits And Socialize Their Losses!"

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MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan and author of Bailout Nation Barry Ritholtz discuss JP Morgan's record $3.6 billion third quarter profits. Ratigan came out swinging and didn't let up from there.

Ratigan: There’s too many people in this country that are afraid to compete, wouldn’t you say? Particularly those banks and it’s time by the way for the opening bell on Wall Street. Stocks opening sharply higher—those better than expected earnings from JP Morgan—a few billion dollars on the take—thanks to your taxpayer subsidies. The Dow making its way towards 10,000.

That’s not a bad thing but you do have to wonder why it is that the taxpayer takes all the downside as the markets march higher. Curious isn’t it?

Heads Banks Win, Tails Taxpayers Lose: JPMorgan Cashing In:

JPMorgan Chase (JPM) — the beneficiary of a $25 billion taxpayer bailout and Trillions in indirect subsidies — reported soaring third quarter profits of $3.6 billion (a seven-fold jump) on an 81% increase in revenues. Moreover, The Wall Street Journal reports JPMorgan is projected to pay $25.9 billion to the bank’s workers. Seems as though socialism is a windfall for private banks.

In this case, taxpayers took all the risk and received none of the upside when lending money to banks such as JPM. Rather than our public servants negotiating on our behalf to get a genuine capitalist deal like Warren Buffett did with Goldman Sachs (GS) and General Electric (GE), we now get to watch JPM et al swim in their profits while our broken system could have benefited from a savvy deal.

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Chris Matthews and Jim Cramer praise President Obama, Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner for saving us from another Great Depression while failing to note a number of things. One, what caused the financial collapse in the first place that resulted in the need to rescue it. Two, that we still don't know where all of our tax dollars went. And three, that the system is still not safe and as Simon Johnson just pointed out on Bill Moyers Journal, things could worse because the system has not been reformed.

Matthews: Well, I guess the big question I would have Jim is if you had to look say five, ten years from now, looking back to now with the clarity of history, does Barack Obama deserve credit for a) avoiding a second Great Depression as he came into office with a strong stimulus of almost two trillion dollars in fiscal stimulus, huge printing of money, the bailouts etc. and secondly has he really put us on the course to recovery from this recession?

Cramer: Alright, I think it’s a team effort. Chris, first of all Ben Bernanke was late, but really went into high gear and the transition from Bush to Obama was really saved by Bernanke’s actions. Second, Bernanke did a good thing, but also Tim Geithner did a good thing and you could argue well Tim Geithner’s totally Obama’s man. Geithner made everybody feel that the banking system was safe. Once we had the banking system safe we began to have the recovery. So Obama should get a lot of credit for that.

Matthews: Well you know when the politicians wag and the right wing goes after them as they do—that’s the way politics works—they say bailouts, bailouts, bailouts as if there’s something wrong with the guy. They say deficits, deficits, deficits as if there’s something wrong with the guy. But everything I studied on college and grad school was that you’ve got to do those things, both in terms of the sectors of the economy which were in trouble, the financial sectors, the auto industry and you had to do something with regard to the over all economy in terms of printing the money, monetary policy, fiscal policy. The very things he did are things you’re taught you have to do. Am I wrong?

Cramer: No! You’re totally right. I hear those people criticize and I think, did they ever read any history about what this country did wrong between 1929 and 1932? This was exactly—what these pundits are calling for is exactly what created a multi-year depression. No! I mean, Bernanke, Obama, Geithner…they got it right!

Matthews: Well, all you hear from on the right is like Terry Jeffrey’s my pal who sits there like from Human Events on the far right, they come on here as if all you had to do was laissez faire. Step back; let the invisible hand solve the problem. Say’s law is still in effect, everything’s going to clear—they actually say this crap… so loudly they must believe it or else they’re just desperate. But they do believe that doing nothing was the right answer. Just balance the budget.

Cramer: They’re dreamers. Look!

Matthews: Let business solve the problem.

Cramer: Here’s the hand. It wasn’t invisible. It was choking America. We are very lucky that these guys understood history. Now the reason why it’s easy to criticize Obama and why he doesn’t take any credit is we haven’t created any jobs yet Chris.

Matthews: Yeah.

Cramer: And that is bad.

Sadly being humiliated by Jon Stewart was not enough to keep Jim Cramer from ever appearing on my television set again. He was right back on the air pretending it didn't happen. I don't know why anyone would take this guy's advice about anything. Later in the segment he also said this when asked about where we were headed with unemployment.

I think we are at the peak or within .1 [of the peak]. We are not going to breach 10%. I have my neck on the line on that.

Oy.

From The Daily Show:

President Obama takes a soft pedal approach to reform when addressing a humbled Wall Street.

I agree with Stewart. A year later and we're still talking about reform in the future tense instead of the past tense? Shameful.

Part 1

Part 2

From Ring of Fire and GoLeftTV, Robert Kennedy Jr. and Matt Taibbi on the bank bailout mess and the bipartisan blame for deregulation that led to the financial meltdown:

The stimulus packages and bailouts that the government has been a little too willing to hand over to our financial industries have not only given these giants more cash in their pockets, but they've also given these companies unprecedented power over our federal government. No other industry has been able to show up in Washington and get a blank check with no oversight, which really shows just who is in charge in our nation's capitol. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. of Air America's Ring of Fire talks about this shift in power with Rolling Stone political correspondent Matt Taibbi.

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June 09, 2009, C-SPAN