DAGONG DOWNGRADES US TO A- FROM A. Subprime securities – still being downgraded. A debt ceiling timeline (of sorts), and other stuff. Debt Ceiling 2013: A Timeline Of Fights Over The U.S. Debt Limit Since 1917. About now, many Americans wish they had never heard the term debt ceiling -- or knew so much about what it meant. But with lawmakers hesitant to approve an increase in the amount that the U.S. government is authorized to pay for debts already incurred by Congress, this phrase has become a household word, as it were.
Although it feels like this latest gridlock between Congress and President Barack Obama is yet another indication of today’s steely partisan politics, debt-ceiling conflicts have been to one degree or another Washington staples for the past four decades. Before the 1970s, not so much. The first time the debt ceiling came into view was in 1917 with the adoption of the Second Liberty Bond Act, which placed limits on expenditures for large categories of debt such as bonds and bills. Before then, Congress had to authorize loans and other debt instruments individually. In 1939, President Franklin D. From the 1980s onward, the federal budget and debt rose significantly.
News Responds to Bernanke Criticism of U.S. Bank-Rescue Coverage. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said in a letter to four senior lawmakers yesterday that recent news articles about the central bank’s emergency lending programs contained “egregious errors.” While Bernanke’s letter and an accompanying four-page staff memo posted on the Fed’s website didn’t mention any news organizations by name, Bloomberg News has published a series of articles this year examining the bailout. The latest, “Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress,” appeared Nov. 28.
“Bloomberg stands by its reporting,” said Matthew Winkler, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, who responded to the criticisms today on “Surveillance Midday” with Tom Keene. Here is a point-by-point response by Bloomberg News to the Fed staff memo. From Fed memo: “These articles have made repeated claims that the Federal Reserve conducted ‘secret’ lending that was not disclosed either to the public or the Congress. Editors: Robert Friedman, John Voskuhl. Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks Undisclosed $13B.
The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing. The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue. Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse. ‘Change Their Votes’ The Fed, headed by Chairman Ben S.