US Reaps Profit as Banks Pay Back TARP Funds

(NEWSER) - The Treasury Department has given 10 banks—including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, American Express, and Capital One—permission to repay their TARP loans, the Wall Street Journal reports. The government will recoup $68 billion faster than anticipated, but the money won’t go back into the public coffers; Tim Geithner intends to deploy it to assist other firms, including some that have already received TARP funds. More»

Investors find causes for optimism in capitalization news

(NEWSER) - Leaked results of the stress tests on America's biggest banks separate sufficiently capitalized banks—including JPMorgan Chase, MetLife, AmEx, and Goldman Sachs—from underfunded ones such as BofA, Wells Fargo, and Citi. Bank shares rose sharply yesterday and today, and some investors said the results were better than they feared. The Wall Street Journal writes that weak banks might have trouble enticing the private investors they'll need, while the New York Times is more optimistic, saying "the big bailouts for the banks may be over." More»

Average payout will be five times median household income in US

(NEWSER) - Recession? What recession? Some Wall Street firms are not feeling any pain this year as record bonuses at just three of the top firms are likely to hit an eye-popping $30 billion. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, the three biggest banks to be bailed out by the feds, will dish out bonuses to 119,000 workers at an amount averaging $250,000 for each. More»

Banks get trillions, fixed-income investors get screwed: Sloan

(NEWSER) - Not fed up enough with just putting your taxpayer dollars directly on the line to bail out the nation’s banks? Allan Sloan has latched on to some insidious “collateral damage” from the government’s rescue plan, those trillions spent “to keep interest rates down to support the economy and prop up housing prices.” That’s all well and good, he writes, until you realize that returns on traditional investments for fixed-income folk have taken a nosedive. More»

Investor looks to clean up on crisis, but is moving out of stocks

(NEWSER) - Even Warren Buffett had a bad financial crisis: The Omaha sage personally lost $25 billion in 2008, enough to put him behind Bill Gates on the worldwide rich list. But while many investors hunkered down as markets tanked, Buffett recalibrated, pouring billions into companies—Goldman Sachs, GE, BofA, Amex—that got federal bailouts and saw their stock prices soar. Buffett's conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway looks headed for a massive payday, reports the New York Times—enough to cement his reputation as the best investor of all time. More»