"Words that make actions speak louder."
AIG Chairman Edward M. Liddy gets the Creep of the Week award for his stunning, overwhelming, dumbfounding display of cluelessness. Liddy not only awarded $165 million in bonuses to the very AIG employees whose risky speculation in credit default swaps bankrupted the once-great insurance giant, forcing it to beg for $170 billion in taxpayer bailouts, […]
Leo W. Gerard: The likes of Alabama Sen. Richard C. Shelby and other “Toyota Republicans,” as I call them, contend that GM and its partners in the Big Three American auto makers are antiquated and irrelevant and should be euthanized. You’ve written a book, “Why GM Matters” that refutes Shelby’s premise by establishing that GM […]
Ever since President Obama announced his plan to forestall foreclosures, many of those lucky enough to have burned their mortgages have angrily suggested that less frugal homeowners get the Creep of the Week award. While acknowledging such prodigal-neighbor-resentment, I am giving the award this week to a much more malevolent, seriously more depraved subprime creep: […]
Leo W. Gerard: Economist James K. Galbraith, the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations at the University of Texas, recently told Deborah Solomon of the New York Times that you are “the person with the most serious claim” for predicting the onslaught of the current credit disaster. The promo for your most recent […]
It would be easy in these troubled times to shrink from campaign promises, to cower from the greatness that might have been, to claim that the beast of the Bush recession had devoured the nation’s potential to achieve great goals. President Barack Obama chose instead to arrive at his first address to a joint session […]
The sky is falling. For the average Working Joe or Jane in America, it is anyway. Unemployment is at 7.6 percent and rising. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that there are 4.1 job seekers now for every opening. The mortgage delinquency rate set another record last quarter, and foreclosures are predicted to top 1 million […]
A decade or so ago, some states gave welfare recipients food stamp debit cards. Welfare mothers could use them to buy groceries with plastic, just like virtually everybody else in the check out line. Plastic made accounting easier for clerks because the debit cards failed to function for excluded items like cigarettes and alcohol. That’s […]
For a brief moment, when Congress authorized that $700 billion bailout for the Wall Street wise guys whose recklessness caused the financial crisis that we’re all suffering, federal officials actually considered giving part of the money to foreign banks. Really. They quickly backed away from using American tax dollars to prop up overseas financial institutions. […]
Symbols of the 16th president of the United States surround the 44th. And they did so from the beginning. Barack Obama, formerly a Senator from Illinois, announced his plan to run for president on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday from the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, the site of Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech, which […]
President Bush took to the TV Friday to announce that he wouldn’t walk past the financial crash of America’s Big Three automakers and do nothing to save their lives. Refusing resuscitation, Bush said, would be irresponsible during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. A week earlier, 31 GOP Senators, mostly from Southern states, […]