Well! This certainly should be an interesting summer:

WASHINGTON – A House panel has subpoenaed documents that lawmakers say could shed new light on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's role in Bank of America's acquisition of Merrill Lynch.

The subpoena comes ahead of a hearing next week in which Bernanke is scheduled to testify.

Lawmakers have accused Bernanke and President Bush's treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, of pressuring Bank of America Corp. Chief Executive Kenneth Lewis into the deal and urging him to keep quiet about Merrill's financial problems.

Not divulging that information would have violated Lewis' fiduciary duty to the bank's shareholders.

Lawmakers also have questioned whether Lewis threatened not to go through with the merger in order to squeeze money from the government.

h/t Scarce. From Flinch Studio.

What have I said, over and over? Bill Kristol is NEVER right. And even Foreign Policy Magazine agrees with me, as they list the worst predictions of 2008 and who else but our favorite war-mongering chickenhawk neocon, William "The Bloody" Kristol.

“If [Hillary Clinton] gets a race against John Edwards and Barack Obama, she’s going to be the nominee. Gore is the only threat to her, then. … Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.” —William Kristol, Fox News Sunday, Dec. 17, 2006

Weekly Standard editor and New York Times columnist William Kristol was hardly alone in thinking that the Democratic primary was Clinton’s to lose, but it takes a special kind of self-confidence to make a declaration this sweeping more than a year before the first Iowa caucus was held. After Iowa, Kristol lurched to the other extreme, declaring that Clinton would lose New Hampshire and that “There will be no Clinton Restoration.” It’s also worth pointing out that this second wildly premature prediction was made in a Times column titled, “President Mike Huckabee?” The Times is currently rumored to be looking for his replacement.

Oh Hallelujah! What a Christmakwanzukkah present that would be. Also in the Hall of Shame:

2. Jim Cramer of Mad Money, for advocating holding onto BearStearns stock six days before it lost 90% of its value and was eventually sold to JP MorganChase.
3. Dennis Blair and Kenneth Lieberthal, for seriously underestimating the potential risks to oil tankers along shipping lanes.
4. Donald Luskin, for not only denying the existance of a recession, but questioning the sanity of anyone who thought we might be in a recession.
5. The Economist Magazine, for their rose-colored view of Kenya's presidential election.
6. Business Week for their prediction that Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg would duke it out for the Democratic nod, only to have surprise underdog John McCain win the presidential election.
7. Scientist Walter Wagner for his opposition to the Large Hadron Collider by suggesting everything from mini-black holes to all out planetary destruction would result.
8. Goldman Sachs analyst Arjun Muti for predicting $200/barrel oil by year's end.
9. Charles Krauthammer, for his completely wrong forecasting of the battle between South Ossetia and Georgia...(not predicting foreign warfare correctly is a specialty of Krauthammer, evidentally).
10. Henry Paulson, for assuring that the banking industry was stabilized by his magic spewing of $700 billion to various industries with little to no oversight.

Please, can we call out an end to taking seriously people like Kristol, Cramer and Krauthammer now?

  CNN's Christine Romans looks through the archives and finds that either the Bush administration was completely oblivious to the impending financial crisis, or were simply lying to the public. Watch and reach your own conclusion.

Download | play   Download | play  

ROMANS: It's about as dire a President can get on the economy.

PRES. BUSH: We're facing a choice between action and the real prospect of economic hardship for millions of Americans.

ROMANS: This from an administration that for months said the economy was vibrant, the financial system strong. The President didn't acknowledge 'storm clouds' until last December, By then, it was raining.

The horror, the horror:

"We have a treasury secretary in America - Hank Paulson. I'm afraid he's gone insane. He's become like the Colonel Kurtz of Treasury Secretaries. He's gone native. He's co-opted trillions of dollars of American taxpayers' money and he's playing hedge fund like a rogue trader. We have got a rogue trader in the Treasury Secretary's office. He's being aided and abetted by Ben Bernanke who's been discredited as the entire Federal Reserve Bank has been utterly discredited. We're looking at a possible inflationary depression in America and the worse is yet to come, much worse is yet to come."

"To pay for all this insanity from Hank Paulson, they have two options. They can either raise taxes or they can inflate the money supply. They can destroy these things US dollars [waves a dollar bill at the camera]. Dollars 30 years ago used to be backed by this stuff - gold [waves a gold coin at the camera]. Now thanks to Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke US dollars are backed by these - bananas [waves a banana at the camera]. They're absolutely worthless. Anyone buying US dollars today is going to lose money."

Do read on....