President Barack Obama escaped to Chicago for this past Valentine’s Day weekend. According to news reports, the President played a little basketball, got a haircut from his favorite barber, and took his wife out to Valentine’s Day dinner. Following Congressional passage of the $787 billion economic stimulus plan and with the auto bailout debate to look forward to this week, his need for a little vacation is understandable.

My burning question about his trip is this: Did he fly commercial?

The U.S. Government has decided that regulators will apply an additional test to banks to determine which financial institutions will get additional capital from the government, and the form of that capital injection.  If the bank doesn’t meet the test created by the U.S. Treasury Department and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, then the bank may [...]

Senator Dodd, Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, reintroduced the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act into the U.S. Senate this week.  Although some of the provisions are similar to the Federal Reserve regulations which will be implemented in July 2010, there are additional provisions in the bill as currently drafted which make it [...]

The Wall Street Journal has just reported that a provision allowing corporations to defer taxes when they buyback their debt at a discount from their bond holders / creditors will remain in the economic stimulus package.  While I support the provision, I find it unfortunate that Congress has not extended the proposal to consumers who [...]

The new White House website has President Barack Obama’s agenda.  I took a few minutes to peruse it and didn’t see bankruptcy reform or debt relief among the major issues listed.  So I did a bit of digging, and here’s what I found.
From the overview of the page on family, it says Obama will “reform [...]

The Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights was reintroduced into Congress today.  It will be interesting to see how the bill develops, since it was already passed by the House of Representatives last year (it did not pass the Senate), and the Federal Reserve will enforce regulations in 2010 that mimic many of the provisions of [...]

Yesterday, I speculated on the question of whether a bailout of those in credit card debt would be fair.  Today, ironically, news sources are reporting that the government may have to provide additional bailout funds to one of the nation’s largest credit card issuers.
Just when I had begun to think that concerns about banks failing [...]

Paul Solman of The Business Desk on the PBS website received a question from an individual wondering if government money wouldn’t better be spent to pay off all of the outstanding credit card debt of Americans.  While to some extent we’ve already got a system to handle out of control credit card debt - known [...]