Matt Taibbi says we should run Elizabeth Warren for president in 2012, and the more I read about how the since-appointed members of the Obama administration handled the financial crisis, the more I like the idea:

Oct. 27 (Bloomberg) -- In the months leading up to the September 2008 collapse of giant insurer American International Group Inc., Elias Habayeb and his colleagues worked nights and weekends negotiating with banks that had bought $62 billion of credit-default swaps from AIG, according to a person who has worked with Habayeb.

Habayeb, 37, was chief financial officer for the AIG division that oversaw AIG Financial Products, the unit that had sold the swaps to the banks. One of his goals was to persuade the banks to accept discounts of as much as 40 cents on the dollar, according to people familiar with the matter.

[...] Beginning late in the week of Nov. 3, the New York Fed, led by President Timothy Geithner, took over negotiations with the banks from AIG, together with the Treasury Department and Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s Federal Reserve. Geithner’s team circulated a draft term sheet outlining how the New York Fed wanted to deal with the swaps -- insurance-like contracts that backed soured collateralized-debt obligations.

CDOs are bundles of debt including subprime mortgages and corporate loans sold to investors by banks.

Part of a sentence in the document was crossed out. It contained a blank space that was intended to show the amount of the haircut the banks would take, according to people who saw the term sheet. After less than a week of private negotiations with the banks, the New York Fed instructed AIG to pay them par, or 100 cents on the dollar. The content of its deliberations has never been made public.

The New York Fed’s decision to pay the banks in full cost AIG -- and thus American taxpayers -- at least $13 billion. That’s 40 percent of the $32.5 billion AIG paid to retire the swaps. Under the agreement, the government and its taxpayers became owners of the dubious CDOs, whose face value was $62 billion and for which AIG paid the market price of $29.6 billion. The CDOs were shunted into a Fed-run entity called Maiden Lane III.

[...] A spokeswoman for Geithner, now secretary of the Treasury Department, declined to comment. Jack Gutt, a spokesman for the New York Fed, also had no comment.

One reason par was paid was because some counterparties insisted on being paid in full and the New York Fed did not want to negotiate separate deals, says a person close to the transaction. “Some of those banks needed 100 cents on the dollar or they risked failure,” Vickrey says.

In other words, Geithner used taxpayer money from one big disaster to paper over the fact that all the other parties were bankrupt, too - and probably still are, no matter what you read in the papers. Wait until the commercial market crashes. Wheee!

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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 MSNBC's Morning Meeting Oct. 16, 2009. Dylan Ratigan explains how Goldman Sachs managed to make $3 billion in three months investing our tax dollars sent to keep them afloat with no strings attached.

For more you can read his entry at the Huffington Post Goldman Sachs' Black Magic, Here's How They Did It.

Goldman at the apex of the crisis is delivered this money -- which they then use to borrow against at $20 or $30 for every $1. Which at 30x equals $2.1 trillion in available capital.

As one of the only banks in the world with money at the time, Goldman Sachs was able to buy billions in distressed assets around the world at record low prices -- only to watch $23.7 trillion in US taxpayer money be deployed during the past year to re-inflate the asset's values that Goldman had purchased with our tax money.

The question is not why did we bail out the banks.

The question is why did we give the banks billions of our money so they could then buy assets by the trillions with our money and they keep the profits?

The answer is Henry Paulson, former Goldman Sachs CEO who ran the US Treasury, and Tim Geithner, current Treasury Secretary who at the time ran the New York Federal Reserve, willingly delivered Goldman Sachs the $70 Billion -- with no strings attached.

So what can we do?

1. We must demand the return of those investment gains made with America's money - it was stolen from us and we can get it back. Demand Claw Backs - and not from the future but from the past - That is where our money is.
2. We must have an exchange for all credit derivatives -- the current version is riddled with loopholes that let banks avoid transparency by mobbing offshore and prohibiting government regulators from being able to force the use of the exchange by the banks.

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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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Another day, another hit piece on ACORN from Fox News. This time from Sean Hannity and Michelle Bachmann. Andy Birkey at the Minnesota Independent has the breakdown on this segment:

Rep. Michele Bachmann continued her campaign against Rep. Barney Frank and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) on Fox News’ Hannity on Wednesday. Despite Bachmann’s claims on the show, a new bill introduced by Frank will not funnel money to ACORN and ACORN is not “under indictment” in 12 states for “voter fraud.”

Frank recently introduced a bill to “use amounts made available under the Troubled Assets Relief Program of the Secretary of the Treasury for relief for homeowners and neighborhoods.” Described as a neighborhood stabilization program, the funds would go to help depressed communities hit hard by the foreclosure crisis.

But Bachmann sees an evil scheme to give money to ACORN.

“Now Barney Frank thinks that [TARP funds] should go out to his friends in ACORN,” she told Sean Hannity. “He is serious about this, about funneling this little bit of money back out to ACORN.”

That little bit of money? “This would be an additional $1.5 billion for ACORN,” she said. “And don’t forget, in over 12 states so far this year ACORN has been indicted for voter fraud.”

The bill itself never mentions ACORN. In fact, it specifically spells out who gets the money:

the Secretary of the Treasury shall transfer $1,500,000,000 to the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and such Secretary shall use such amounts for assistance to States and units of general local government for the redevelopment of abandoned and foreclosed homes

And as noted in the article, ACORN has not been accused of voter fraud. Some of their employees have been accused of voter registration fraud. There is a big difference. There has been a raid on one of their Nevada offices, but after reading TPM's reporting on the topic, I've got to wonder if that was politically motivated as well. The right loves to demonize ACORN since they'd prefer as few poor and minority voters as possible actually get registered and have a chance to vote.

It's not up to the ACORN workers to verify those registrations. They can't throw them out because they think there are problems with them, and as BradBlog noted, it was the ACORN workers themselves that alerted election officials about the potential problems with some of the registrations they submitted in the first place.

They have to turn them in and let the local election offices sort them out. If that wasn't the case, I could decide to go volunteer for ACORN, and then proceed to throw out every registration from someone I assumed was a Republican because I didn't want them voting.

It's really disgusting to see these right wingers on Fox "News" turning ACORN into a dirty word day after day. I've got to wonder if it's not bad enough that ACORN might actually have a case against them for slander.

It's getting to the point where I don't even want to read Simon Johnson anymore. Yes, he's right. If we reduce oversight safeguards to "trust us," we have a system far too ripe for corruption - in fact, almost asking for it:

Buried in the late wire news on Friday – and therefore barely registering in the newspapers over the weekend – Treasury announced the rules for pricing its option to buy shares in banks that participated in TARP.

The Treasury Department said the banks will make the first offer for the warrants. Treasury will then decide to sell at that price or make a counteroffer. If the government and a bank cannot agree on a fair price for the warrants, the two sides will have the right to use private appraisers.

This is a mistake.

The only sensible way to dispose of these options is for Treasury to set a floor price, and then hold an auction that permits anyone to buy any part – e.g., people could submit sealed bids and the highest price wins.

In Treasury’s scheme, there is significant risk of implicit gift exchange with banks - good jobs/political support/other favors down the road – or even explicit corruption. For sure, there will be accusations that someone at Treasury was too close to this or that bidder. Why would Treasury’s leadership want to be involved in price setting in this fashion?

Treasury apparently sees corruption as an issue about personalities (i.e., WE aren’t ever corrupt) rather than about institutional structure. For example, if you create an arrangement that easily permits corruption, such as through nontransparent decision making or negotiation around warrant pricing, you set up incentives to be corrupt. Either existing people change their behavior, or new people will seek appointment in order to participate in corruption.

This is also a point, by the way, that Treasury has been making for years through its representatives at the International Monetary Fund – including during the Clinton Administration, when the same people were running U.S. economic policy as now. It’s a good point and never easy for countries-with-potential-corruption to hear. It applies as much to the United States as to anywhere else.

Treasury will argue the disposal of warrants is a one-off event, but this is not a plausible line: it is part of a much longer series of nontransparent decisions over finance. The attitude that “we can be nontransparent because we will never be corrupt” creates reputational risk for both Treasury and participating banks. If extraordinary support for the financial sector lasts several years, we will likely have at least one time-consuming and damaging investigation into all the details of these settlements.

Here's an example of what "Patriots" consider good clean fun...certainly nothing that could be considered "extreme" or dangerous wingnuttery

The Confluence: Did Hank Paulson use TARP as a "ruse" to rescue Citigroup?

The Reaction: David Brooks backs Sotomayor - but still espouses the racist double standard of the right

Multi Medium: Self-Promotion Fail

Consortiumblog: Tying Obama to Bush's budget mess.  Republicans blame President Obama for an ocean of red ink, but a study shows most came from President Bush

Progressive Blog Digest: All roundup, all the time

I can't imagine the thinking behind this. We lend them the money and then let them pay it back - before we've fixed the problems that lead to the crash in the first place? And it won't do much for consumers, since half of them are investment banks.

Elizabeth Warren is skeptical, and wants to hear the terms of repayment. She also warns that the stress tests were not as strong as they should have been. Stay tuned:

... The decision to allow the banks to exit the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, also ushered in a new, and potentially risky, phase of the banking crisis. Letting the lenders out now — earlier than many had envisioned, and without the industry reforms some consider necessary to prevent future crises — raises many sobering questions for policy makers, bankers and taxpayers.

The program was aimed at purchasing assets and equity from banks to strengthen them and encourage them to expand lending during a tightening credit squeeze. But after banks return the TARP money, the administration will forfeit much of its leverage over them. With that loss goes a rare opportunity to overhaul the industry. The administration’s ability to push institutions to purge themselves quickly of bad assets and do more to help hard-pressed homeowners will be diminished.

Of even deeper concern is the running trouble inside the banking industry. Despite tentative signs of revival, many banks remain fragile. Four of the nation’s five largest lenders, including Citigroup and Bank of America, were not allowed to return their bailout funds.

Some analysts worry that financial institutions that repay bailout money now may turn to Washington again if the economy worsens and losses overwhelm banks. One of the most vexing problems of the credit crisis — how to rid banks of their troubled mortgage investments — remains unresolved.

Which, of course, is why so many experts were urging the administration to nationalize the banks. Those bad mortgages have to be dealt with sooner or later, and the bailout program simply postponed the day of reckoning.

The banks are eager to escape TARP and the restrictions that come with it, particularly the limits on how much they can pay their 25 most highly compensated workers. (Even so, the Obama administration plans to propose guidelines on executive compensation for the broader industry as early as Wednesday.)

Yet even banks that return taxpayers’ money will remain dependent on other forms of government aid. Among them are enhanced deposit insurance, incentive payments to modify home mortgages and federal guarantees on bonds that banks sell to raise capital.

“They may need the government’s money to get through this storm,” Christopher Whalen, a managing partner at Institutional Risk Analytics, said of the banks. “If the banks have to come back and ask for more money in a few months, I don’t think the response from Washington will be too kind.”

Don't kid yourself that this means these banks are healthy - far from it. It means they want to go back to their old carefree, criminal ways:

The Treasury Department cleared the way for 10 big banks on Tuesday to start repaying billions of dollars in taxpayer aid, a crucial step in easing the government’s grip after an unprecedented series of interventions.

The banks were deemed strong enough to leave the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, after months of lobbying and strong performances on recent stress tests. The banks are expected to return about $68.3 billion to the Treasury Department, more than double the administration’s initial estimate of about $25 billion in funds to be returned this year. The timetable is also earlier than government officials originally intended.

Although the Treasury did not identify the banks, people briefed on the situation said they include American Express, Bank of New York Mellon, the BB&T Corporation, Capital One Financial, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, the State Street Corporation and US Bancorp. All passed the stress test and applied to return their TARP funds. Another bank, Morgan Stanley, which needed to raise $1.8 billion after the stress test, was also said to have received permission, as was Northern Trust, a large custodial bank that did not undergo the stress test.

The $68.3 billion represents about a quarter of the TARP money given to banks. So far, 22 small community banks have been allowed to return $1.9 billion in government money.

Within the next few days, the big banks will be able to wire the money back to the Treasury Department. Still, they will not fully get out from under the government’s thumb until they rid themselves of warrants giving taxpayers a share of the potential upside on their investments.

Analysts say warrants for the 10 big banks could be worth as much as $4.6 billion. Treasury officials have not disclosed how they plan to value and sell them.

It was my understanding that there were penalties for early repayment of TARP loans, but this Daily Beast story doesn't mention it. According to them, Goldman Sachs will soon be out from under government control:

Wall Street may have another reason to hate Goldman Sachs: The venerable firm with contacts throughout the federal government looks as though it may be the first financial institution to be allowed to repay government bailout money, The Daily Beast has learned. Repaying its TARP loan would free Goldman from various restrictions, including those on the compensation of key executives.

The decision as to which banks would be given the green light from banking regulators, most notably the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department, could be made as early as next week, these people say. Goldman already has a tentative approval from the Treasury and is awaiting approval from the Federal Reserve, according to one person with knowledge of the matter.

JP Morgan feels comfortable they have convinced both the Treasury and Fed that they should be allowed to repay the money along with the first group of banks.

During the height of the financial crisis the federal government handed out billions in aid to the big banks in an effort to boost capital levels depleted by bad real estate loans and bonds. While the bailout money helped stabilized a spreading financial panic, it also led to massive government ownership of some of the nation's largest banks and controls on business practices and compensation.

As the financial crisis has abated, some banks, most notably Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley have said they can now repay the money and get out from under federal control. The government must first approve the measure; last week it announced results of so-called stress tests to determine which banks have the most capital to withstand further erosion in business conditions. The government also announced two conditions to repay the money: The issuance of debt that is not backed by FDIC insurance and sufficient so-called "tier one" capital levels. Tier one capital is the strongest capital in the market.

Based on the stress tests, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan were deemed to be among the strongest of the big banks; unlike Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Citigroup, both Goldman and JP Morgan were not required by regulators to raise capital levels. Since that time, officials at Goldman and JP Morgan have been pressuring regulators to allow them to repay the bailout money that was granted from the Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP.

He's also looking into the AIG disbursements to counterparties, which will open a fresh can of worms:

WASHINGTON (CNNMoney.com) -- The top cop tracking the government's $700 billion bailout program said Tuesday that he has opened 20 criminal investigations and six audits into whether tax dollars are being pilfered or wasted.

Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, released a 250-page report detailing a long list of concerns about government efforts to prop up hundreds of banks, Wall Street firms and auto companies.

Barofsky, whose investigations could lead to criminal charges, told CNNMoney.com in an interview that he wants taxpayers to understand where their money is going. At the same time, he wants to alert officials to weaknesses in TARP that could invite corruption or fraud.

Bug - or feature? Hmmm.

"Our recommendations are forward looking and there are no vulnerabilities that can't be addressed," Barofsky said. "The balance of what we're trying to do is to inform, bring transparency and make appropriate recommendations."

The report reveals that Barofsky is looking into whether bailout decisions were influenced by those who stood to benefit from them and whether companies receiving bailout dollars are adhering to caps on executive pay.

Barofsky's report also makes several recommendations to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and other officials charged with implementing the bailout. Among them: Require all TARP recipients to detail how they use bailout dollars and safeguard a new mortgage rescue effort against scams.

Slate points out this morning: "At first the government seemed intent on making sure AIG paid high interest rates for the taxpayer funds, but now those dreams seem to be over as officials have concluded the insurance company is so intertwined with other parts of the financial sector that its collapse would be much more expensive in the long run." (Which, by the way, is also why we need to save the auto industry.) From the New York Times:

The federal government agreed Sunday night to provide an additional $30 billion in taxpayer money to the American International Group and loosen the terms of its huge loan to the insurer, which is preparing to report a $62 billion loss on Monday, the biggest quarterly loss in history, people involved in the discussions said.

The intervention would be the fourth time that the United States has had to step in to help A.I.G., the giant insurer, avert bankruptcy. The government already owns nearly 80 percent of the insurer’s holding company as a result of the earlier interventions, which included a $60 billion loan, a $40 billion purchase of preferred shares and $50 billion to soak up the company’s toxic assets.

Federal officials, who worked feverishly over the weekend to complete the restructuring, said they thought they had no choice but to prop up A.I.G., because its business and trading activities are so intricately woven through the world’s banking system.

But the deal also presents more financial risks to taxpayers at a time when the public and Congress have been sharply questioning the wisdom of risking federal money to bail out private enterprises.

The government’s commitment to A.I.G. far eclipses its rescue of other financial companies, including Citigroup, which has received $50 billion in rescue financing, and Bank of America, with $45 billion.

Credit rating agencies like Moody’s, Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poor’s had been preparing to sharply downgrade A.I.G.’s credit ratings on Monday because of the record quarterly loss. That would have forced A.I.G. to default on its debt, threatening to set off shock waves throughout the financial system as banks holding A.I.G. derivatives contracts would probably demand cash collateral and other payments from A.I.G. during a time when it has little to spare.

The major credit-rating agencies were briefed on the pending deal between A.I.G. and the government, the people involved in the talks said, and they have committed not to downgrade the company’s debt as a result.

Under the deal, the government will commit $30 billion in cash to A.I.G. from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, should the company need it, according to the people involved in the talks. A.I.G. is not expected to draw down the money immediately, but the government’s commitment was enough to satisfy the rating agencies.

It is, of course, a mere coincidence that the firm for which the spouse of the House Republican whip works has scarfed up a couple of hundred million bucks in the banking bailout. Really. (I can understand why you might wonder, considering Rep. Cantor's role model seems to be the disgraced Tom DeLay.)

So for now, we'll take them at their word. But just imagine that this happened with the spouse of the House Democratic whip, and picture the heated Republican outrage! The press conference, the cable TV talking heads frothing at the mouth! The decrying of greed, the cries of pained incredulity...

Because the firm didn't actually need the money. They simply restructured their tax setup so they would be eligible. After all, you can never have too much money:

WASHINGTON — A bank that employs the wife of Rep. Eric I. Cantor, R-Va., benefited from the $700 billion Wall Street bailout that Cantor helped steer through Congress last fall.

Diana F. Cantor runs a Virginia-based subsidiary of New York Private Bank and Trust. The New York bank received $267.2 million from the U.S. Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program Jan. 9.

A spokesman for New York Private Bank and Trust told ProPublica, an investigative journalism Web site that first reported the relationship, Diana Cantor was “never aware that the parent bank was seeking or received [bailout] funding.” A spokesman for the New York bank declined to comment for this report.

Diana Cantor, the managing director of the subsidiary, Virginia Private Bank and Trust, did not return a phone call seeking comment Monday. She also serves on Media General’s board of directors.

[Editor's note: Props to Media General for following up on an embarrassing story about their own board member. After all, she's an attorney, a CPA and an investment banker. You might expect her to be better informed about these things!]

Through a spokesman, Eric Cantor declined to comment. Rob Collins, the congressman’s deputy chief of staff, called the government investment in the parent company of his wife’s bank “a freak coincidence” and said the congressman did nothing to facilitate it.

Cantor first learned the bank received the money when his wife emailed him a Jan. 16 article in American Banker, Collins said.

“It’s not like she’s lobbying for the industry,” Collins said. “She has no clue what’s going on up in New York.”

Hundreds of banks, financial institutions and auto companies have received funding from the Treasury program.

The $267.2 million given to New York Private Bank and Trust is almost nine times the median amount received by companies participating in the program, a Media General News Service analysis of Treasury records found.

In the American Banker article, New York Private Bank and Trust chairman and CEO Howard P. Milstein said he changed the bank’s tax structure to make it eligible for the bailout.

The bank was not short on cash, but Milstein told American Banker, “We are in a season when you can’t have too much capital.”

[...] The fact that the government did not disclose the Cantors’ relationship when providing funding to Diana Cantor’s employer underscores an overall lack of transparency with the bailout, critics of the program said.

[...] Rep. Cantor should have disclosed how his wife’s company could benefit from the bailout and recused himself from related votes, said Jeffrey S. Harrison, a professor of management at the University of Richmond’s Robins School of Business.

“Transparency is absolutely vital and that information should have been disclosed much earlier,” said Harrison, who has written about business ethics.

But Harrison said that it was unlikely that Diana Cantor was aware of the company’s request for government funds. Even the board of directors of the parent company would probably “not (be) involved in that level of detail at all,” he said. As director of the subsidiary, Harrison said, Diana Cantor would have been “further removed.”

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Barney Frank visited the set of the Rachel Maddow Show to talk about the TARP hearings and at the end of the interview he said something that was music to my ears.

Maddow: Should they be constrained from doing those things by rules rather than just being shamed for when they don't do it?

Frank: There's no question about it for the future. Look there's a problem in the American system and we as liberals should be honoring this. The principle that you don't go back and do things retroactively is a very important liberal principle so some of the things that the Bush administration let them do we can then undo. We can prevent them from going forward and this I can guarantee you.

We will very soon be adopting a set of regulations. We're going to be doing essentially now what Franklin Roosevelt had to do in the New Deal, what Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had to do around the turn of the last century. There is a whole lot of new financial activity that's going on and it's caused some damage and done some good, but it's gone on without rules and the one thing I am most confident about is we know how to stop this from happening again. Banning the bad subprime loans. Restricting the excessive kinds of leverage they've had.

Yeah, this is a very high priority for us and I think by the summer we're going to have a set of rules in place. It's going to be comparable I think to what FDR did with the New Deal, with the Securities and Exchange Commission and other rules. We will not depend on their good will. We will put some tough rules in place.

All I can say is I hope he means it, and that he follows through on what he said tonight. I don't know much about economics. It frankly bored me and was just never something I took an interest in. But I'm not a stupid person and I know after watching the 60 Minutes segment A Look at Wall Street's Shadow Market that if we didn't do something to regulate Wall Street that nothing was going to improve in our economy because there would be no trust of our current system.

I make that assumption because I don't trust it now and I'm probably like a lot of other people out there who thought they were spreading their risks in their 401(K)s, if you were lucky enough to have one, and watched it tank by close to forty percent over the last year. For anyone close to retirement age like a lot of my co-workers, those sort of losses are just devastating. You think you're doing the right thing and trying to prepare for retirement and poof, years and years of savings just vanished in a matter of a few weeks or sometimes a few days. I watched friends walking around in what was close to a state of shock when the market crashed.

So I welcome Barney Frank's talk of regulating these markets. I think it's overdue, and this summer could not come fast enough if that's when they try to get it through. For contrast, here's your standard talking head on the "news" saying 'thank goodness Tim Geithner didn't come out with any crazy talk about regulating this mess'. Yeah, that's the ticket, Joe Johns. Forget any regulation that might stop these industries from continuing to cook their books and leverage themselves in a way that would put a regulated insurance company out of business.

As John said before, and I'll repeat it for him: ....Why aren't there hundreds of economists on my TV explaining the stimulus package? And why am I seeing people like Joe Johns tell us what we should think of regulating the industries that drove our economy off the edge of a cliff?

January 15, 2009 C-SPAN