Economic Glance
Financial giants now being bailed out by the government spent millions underwriting the Democratic and Republican conventions last summer, just weeks before coming to Washington begging for multibillion-dollar handouts.
The big donors included AIG, Ford Motor Co., Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Freddie Mac.
In all, major corporations, labor unions and individual millionaires dumped $118 million into the nominating conventions for Barack Obama and John McCain, according to reports from the Campaign Finance Institute and the Center for Responsive Politics. The private groups compiled the numbers from filings required under federal law.
Before handouts, big firms bankrolled conventions
The Best and the Brightest Have Led America Off a Cliff
Don't expect the so-called experts to fix it either. They can't. They are loyal to the decaying political and financial systems that empowered them.
The nation’s elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent and often subversive. They organize learning around minutely specialized disciplines, narrow answers and rigid structures that are designed to produce certain answers. The established corporate hierarchies these institutions service -- economic, political and social -- come with clear parameters, such as the primacy of an unfettered free market, and with a highly specialized vocabulary.
AIG May Double Some Salaries With Retention Payments
Some executives among 130 recipients will get more than $500,000, about 200 percent of their salaries, to stay through 2009, said the person, who declined to be named because the information hasn’t been publicly disclosed. An undetermined number of lower-paid employees will also get cash awards to dissuade them from quitting, the person said.
Luxury Shame
Across America's upper strata, rich folk like Hirtenstein are experiencing an unfamiliar emotion: luxury shame. The late Coco Chanel, doyenne of 20th century fashion, long ago said that luxury is "the opposite of vulgarity," not of poverty. But in these recessionary times, it seems vulgar to flaunt one's luxurious lifestyle. And so the wealthy are going blingless and eschewing the spending sprees of the recent Gilded Age, giving new meaning to the phrase "embarrassment of riches."
US diluted loan rules before crash
The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents.
As mortgages went bad, New Century executives cashed out
While the Irvine subprime lender was failing, key executives continually changed their stock trading plans and often sold within days of colleagues' trades, a Times investigation shows.
No charges have been filed, and attorneys for the company's former top executives say that none of the executives sold stock based on information that had not been disclosed to the public and that the executives retained most of their shares when the company went under.
Wachovia execs may get $98.1 million severance
Wachovia Corp (NYSE:WB), which lost $33 billion in the last two quarters, said 10 top executives may be entitled to $98.1 million in severance pay after the bank is acquired by Wells Fargo & Co (NYSE:WFC).
Wachovia also said a closing would entitle its 11 executive officers, who include Steel, as well as Chairman Lanty Smith to $2.5 million in equity-based awards under existing stock incentive plans. But the executives' stock options are worthless, the bank said.
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