Text of Fed Chairman Bernanke's comments

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke declared Friday that the U.S. economy is on the verge of a long-awaited recovery.

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CIT Group in talks with regulators, shares tumble

Shares of diversified lender CIT Group Inc. plunged Monday even as U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner indicated there could be help for the ailing company.

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Analyst: GM not in immediate danger of bankruptcy

An auto analyst with JPMorgan says General Motors Corp. is not in danger of an imminent bankruptcy, but will need to raise about $10 billion in cash to weather the downturn in U.S. auto sales.

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CIT Borrows $7.3 Billion to Repay Debt

Commercial and consumer lender CIT Group Inc. said Thursday it tapped its $7.3 billion credit lines to repay debt and finance its commercial lending and is seeking additional funding sources as access to capital has dried up.

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New York Fed Adds Extra Liquidity

The New York Federal Reserve announced Monday it was implementing several measures to increase liquidity in the parched credit markets ahead of the year's end.

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Standard & Poor's Ratimg Services has placed California's credit rating, already the lowest among the states, on a watch list "with negative implications" due to the state's chronic and unresolved budget deficit.

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It's All About The Money!

As I listen to the Wall Street pundits today, their latest line is about "the inevitable rally" that they claim is coming. One guy went so far as to pronounce on TV that "the market is severely oversold".

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The latest theme of pundit commentary on the Obama administration is overload.

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Has Barack Obama's presidency already failed? In normal times, this would be a ludicrous question. But these are not normal times. They are times of great danger. Today, the new US administration can disown responsibility for its inheritance; tomorrow, it will own it.

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Anna Schwartz says Ben Bernanke is WRONG - and she should know. She and Milton Friedman wrote the book on money.

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President Bush announced $13.4 billion in emergency loans on Friday to prevent the collapse of General Motors and Chrysler, and said another $4 billion would be available for the hobbled automakers in February.

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Brilliance has sometimes been a criterion in presidential appointments, of course, but seldom the major one. It usually takes a back seat to rewarding friends and backers, playing congressional politics, seeking diversity, and appeasing industry and interest groups.

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President-elect Barack Obama is pushing Congress this year to approve as much as $50 billion to save cash-starved U.S. automakers and appoint a czar or board to oversee the companies, a move that would require President George W.

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By Seo Eun-kyung and Yoo Choonsik SEOUL, Oct 30 (Reuters) - South Korea tied up a $30 billion currency swap deal with the U.S. Federal Reserve, sending its battered financial markets up sharply on Thursday on belief that the country's liquidity crisis may at last be easing.

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Too Little to Laugh at, the Past Week!

If you were reading the news paper or watching much television, laughing was not the order of the week. The usual fare of homicide and robbery kept their prominent spots.

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When Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that California might have to go to the Federal Government for a $7 billion loan to fund its daily operations, it was the most dramatic display yet of how state and local governments are being buffeted by the deterioration in credit m …

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The removal of an SEC rule in 2004, along with the broader push by the Republican Congress and the Bush Administration to continue the overall deregulation of multiple sectors of the U.S. economy, allowed the tremendous risks of capital reserves by banks.

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Economists said the ISM index was near recessionary levels.

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The Fed's expansion of liquidity, the biggest since credit markets seized up last year, came hours before the U.S. House of Representatives rejected a $700 billion bailout for the financial industry.

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Professor Stiglitz: "The administration is once again holding a gun at our head, saying, "My way or the highway." We have been bamboozled before by this tactic. We should not let it happen to us again. There are alternatives."

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Posted by George Washington - Friday, September 26, 2008 I previously pointed out that when the Japanese government threw cash at their big banks in the 90's, the banks just horded the money instead of using it to restore "liquidity".

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Hank Paulson has got to be kidding. He wants American taxpayers to hand a cool $US700 billion ($840 billion) to his pals on Wall Street in return for a gigantic bundle of their delinquent assets ... without his pals taking a pay cut.

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The masters of the universe now seem masters of nothing. Within the financial world though, alternatives to the Treasury plan emerge from bright and independent money managers outside the group-think of large corporatist investment banks.

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In a change from the original proposal sent to Capitol Hill, foreign-based banks with big U.S. operations could qualify for the Treasury Department's mortgage bailout, according to the fine print of an administration statement Saturday night.

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The Bank of England has imposed a permanent news blackout on its £50bn-plus plan to ease the credit crunch.

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The Fed: A New World Vision

The sleepy complacency of the past has been rudely interrupted by a liquidity shock of colossal proportions. The skies of finance are dark and stormy. The drama within the banking and financial industries is unprecedented.

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Commentary and weekly watch by Doug Noland

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The Fed has started purchasing United States securities today to bolster the economy. Essentially, the Fed is temporarily buying bank-banked securities to increase liquidity within the banking system and to loosen the hold of the credit crisis.

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Conspiracy theorists at gata.org will have a field day with this, but it does make sense for the IMF to try and inject some extra liquidity around the world.

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The world's press has been focused on the financial fallout for the banks from the credit squeeze and the crisis of liquidity following the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market in the US.

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