As the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission begins looking at the causes of the recent financial crisis, we need to consider that crisis is a failure of governance. Lucian Bebchuk from Harvard Law School has written extensively on the failure of private sector governance: boards that failed to make informed judgments or control the risks incurred by their institutions, self-serving management that lost control over reckless risk taking and compensation systems that invited speculation by traders.

Readers, this is an excellent interview which references to several articles which have already been posted to this site. The analysis is impeccable, in my opinion, and is based upon results and historical data. As such, it is way better that most of the wishful thinking pretending to be economics. This also comes out of the institutional economics discourse. Admin.

A key question at the heart of the controversial bailout of AIG is just how much money the government lost. The Federal Reserve and Treasury Department have worked to keep that number secret and to conceal who was on the winning end.

An unredacted document obtained by the Huffington Post list the damage in detail. Goldman Sachs alone, for instance, got $14 billion in government money for assets worth $6 billion at the time -- a de facto $8 billion subsidy, courtesy of taxpayers.

The truly extraordinary disclosures were that Paulson, Bernanke, and Geithner all purported to have had no involvement in one of the most expensive decisions in history -- the decision to pay 100 cents on the dollar to the least deserving of recipients (and who, if Geithner's testimony were to be believed, did not need to receive that largess) -- and the unprincipled and indefensible decision to try to get AIG to cover up that fact and the beneficiaries of that largess.

There is a lot of speculation over the reappointment of Ben Bernanke to continue to head the Fed, with the Obama Administration pushing hard. Of course, Wall Street is also calling in its favors. It looks like a done deal. The Administration has probably got the 60 votes required in the Senate to remove the hold, and the 51 votes needed for confirmation.

Part I: How Much More “Debt Recovery” can the Economy Take?

Today, President Obama finally took meaningful action toward financial reform, apparently prodded by his disaster in Massachusetts. Heck, if the Democrats cannot retain Teddy’s seat, there is no safe refuge. The Republicans and Tea Partiers will take the next election in a landslide unless Obama changes course, and fast.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The U.S. economic recession has taken a particularly heavy toll on young Americans, with a record one out five black men aged 20 to 24 neither working nor in school, according to research released on Tuesday. Teenagers have found it significantly harder to get a job since the recession began in late 2007, with black youths and young people from low-income families faring the worst, wrote Andrew Sum of Northeastern University in Boston, a employment researcher commissioned by the Chicago Urban League and the Alternative Schools Network.

U.S. consumers defaulted on store-branded credit cards at near-record levels during the holiday shopping season, with 2010 likely to bring more of the same trend, according to Fitch Ratings. Fitch's December Retail Credit Card Index results show that more than one in every eight dollars of receivables was written off as uncollectable during the November collection period on an annualized basis. Taken with the recent delinquency trends and Fitch's expectation for unemployment, Fitch expects retail card chargeoffs to remain elevated throughout first half-2010.

Until this week, Paul Adolph Volcker, the 82-year-old architect of President Barack Obama's latest assault on Wall Street, was not so much yesterday's man as the man of a couple of decades ago. After all, the pinnacle of his career was being chairman of the Federal Reserve, a job he held from 1979 until 1987.

Mr Volcker, who currently heads the President's external panel of advisers on economic recovery, has consistently advocated a more aggressive approach to fixing the financial system that has not, until now, found favour within the administration.