Month: March 2009

Watch out if you live in or visit Washington, D.C. If you see a camera or microphone, be careful not to be trampled by a politician rushing to shout their “outrage” at AIG, and its brazen scheme to pay $165 million in bonuses to employees at the company unit responsible for driving the company to…

Is it fair to complain about the actions of the financial deregulators? Could anyone reasonably have foreseen the consequences of a decades-long regulatory holiday for the financial sector? In a word, yes. In preparing “Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America,” a report that documents a dozen deregulatory steps to financial meltdown, it…

What can $5 billion buy in Washington? Quite a lot. Over the 1998-2008 period, the financial sector spent more than $5 billion on U.S. federal campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures. This extraordinary investment paid off fabulously. Congress and executive agencies rolled back long-standing regulatory restraints, refused to impose new regulations on rapidly evolving and mushrooming…