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"Wall Street's $18.4 Billion Bonus", Micheal Shnayerson, Vanity Fair, 2/3/2009.
After getting $125 billion in taxpayer
bailouts, the top officers at Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and three other banks agreed to forgo their 2008 bonuses.
Now they’re awarding billions to their troops. Can government “claw back” that money? How is it possible
that America can be lending billions of dollars to America? Are we not already in debt?
"Big Job Cutbacks Might Cussion Profit Decline", John M. Berry, Bloomberg.com, 2/3/2009.
Early in recessions, doubts about how bad things will get usually cause companies to be slow in firing workers. Not this time. Fearing what may lie ahead for an economy struggling with a financial crisis, companies have instituted waves of layoffs
that pushed the unemployment rate to 7.2 percent in December, up 2.3 percentage points since the recession began in late 2007.
Economists surveyed by Bloomberg expect it to rise to 7.5 percent when the Labor Department releases January figures on Feb.
6. The rapid effort to cut costs as sales have fallen has turned the jobless rate, usually regarded as
a so-called lagging economic indicator, into a coincident or even a leading indicator.
"Obama’s Failing Leadership" Human Events, Jed Babbin, 2/23/2009
Obama’s leadership failed its first two important tests, and is about to fail again. Last October,
then running mate Joe Biden prophesied that Obama would be tested by a foreign crisis quickly. Biden told a Seattle audience
that they’d need to stick with him and Obama because their decisions wouldn’t seem correct initially. He begged
for time. But the economic crisis challenged Obama’s leadership before our foreign enemies could. Obama has failed twice
and there is little reason to believe his leadership will improve. His political character isn’t built on leadership
skills. In the first two tests he hasn’t demonstrated it.
"Banking on the Brink" Paul Krugman, 2/23/2009, The New York Times
First, some major banks are dangerously close to the edge — in fact, they would have failed already
if investors didn’t expect the government to rescue them if necessary. Second, banks must be rescued. The collapse of
Lehman Brothers almost destroyed the world financial system, and we can’t risk letting much bigger institutions like
Citigroup or Bank of America implode. Third, while banks must be rescued, the U.S. government can’t afford, fiscally
or politically, to bestow huge gifts on bank shareholders.
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