EconomicCrisis.US

The measures the government has undertaken to rescue the U.S. financial system will cost “dramatically less” than anticipated, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said.

The billions spent to rescue the submerged credit markets and financial institutions in the past year have already cycled back to the Treasury, Geithner said, and the taxpayers have made a modest profit.

“Banks are repaying with interest. And we’re going to be able to solve this financial crisis at dramatically less cost than we initially anticipated,” Geithner said, during an interview on the Fox Business Network, pointing to Bank of America’s decision to repay its Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) loans. “And that’s going to allow us to devote substantial resources to meet the very difficult challenges we still face as a country.”
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Several congressional Democrats said on Wednesday they plan to introduce legislation next week to cap credit card interest rates.

With unemployment and Wall Street bonuses incongruously rising together, the chairman of the House Rules Committee said she will offer a bill to cap rates at 16 percent, a proposal that could catch a wave of Populist sentiment in the House.

“Things were a lot better for the average person in this country when we had usury caps,” Representative Louise Slaughter, head of the rules panel, said in a statement.

“Watching how credit card companies have exploited people by increasing rates up to 30 percent and more is criminal and this bill will allow us to put an end to this,” she said.
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Gold has surged 60% in the past 12 months and it’s not letting up. The “yellow metal” is continuing that scorching surge into the last part of the year, establishing new highs on a near-daily basis. In fact, gold established yet another record price Wednesday when it peaked at $1,153.40 an ounce on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX).

And the records are going to keep on coming.

With the U.S. dollar in a freefall and global gold demand rising, analysts say the precious metal will likely continue its bullish trend through at least the first half of 2010. It could rise as high as $2,000 an ounce, which would represent a 73% gain from current record levels.
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It’s over a year now since the 2008 financial crisis spread havoc throughout the global economy. Dozens of books and articles have appeared to explain what went wrong. They identify culprits ranging from Wall Street financiers overleveraging assets, to ACORN lobbying policy-makers to lower mortgage standards, to politicians closely connected to government-sponsored enterprises such as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae failing to exercise oversight of those agencies.

As time passes, armies of doctoral students will explore every nook and cranny of the 2008 meltdown. But if most governments’ policy responses to the crisis are any guide, it’s apparent that many lessons from the financial crisis are being ignored or escaping most policy-makers’ attention. Here are five of them.
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