Corporate Welfare

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., who received such love from Senators, especially Republican senators, in a recent Senate hearing, owes some of his fortune to taxpayers. According to Bloomberg and research by the International Money Fund, JPMorgan "receives a government subsidy worth about $14 billion a year....[which] helps the bank pay big salaries and bonuses...[and] distorts markets, fueling crises such as the recent subprime-lending disaster and the sovereign-debt debacle that is now threatening to destroy the euro and sink the global economy." Read the entire article at: "Dear Mr. Dimon, Is Your Bank Getting Corporate Welfare?," to get a step-by-step discussion of how corporate welfare affects us all. (h/t Think Progress: Economy)

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, "the financial sector is far and away the largest source of campaign contributions to federal candidates and parties." In the 2011-2012 cycle so far, Mitt Romney has received far more contributions than any other presidential candidate: $19, 222, 965 to Obama's $8, 414, 629. Of the top 20 recipients of the financial industry's largesse, 14 are Republicans and 6 are Democrats. Insurance heads the financial industry PACs in contributions, with 62% of its contributions going to Republicans this year, compared to 38% to Democrats.

The financial industry is hedging its bets, of course, but it looks as if the Republicans are the favored horse in this year's race. Wonder what the industry will expect in return. Not.

Sucking up to Wall Street as Usual

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, testified before the Senate Banking Committee today about the more than $2 billion (and rising) the bank recently lost in risky hedges. Instead of being intensely questioned and sermonized on the need for regulation, Dimon

received a warm welcome from Republican lawmakers, suggesting that his status as Washington’s favorite banker remains intact. Some Republicans praised JPMorgan for navigating the financial crisis better than other Wall Street firms, and even sought Mr. Dimon’s advice on fixing the economy. ["JPMorgan's Chief Says Clawbacks 'Likely,'" in  The New York Times, 13 June 2012]

Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) told Dimon that lawmakers "can hardly sit in judgment of your losing $2 billion."

Really? Well, what's the use of our lawmakers, huh?

Yep, just the person to trust.....if you're hoping for some Wall Street money for your political campaign. And, of course, the connections between JP Morgan and the Senate Banking Committee are very close and entangled; folks who work for our lawmakers on that committee become lobbyists for the financial institution. Kiss, kiss....

See Cora Currier's details of the revolving door in her article, "Charting the Cozy Connections between JP Morgan and the Senate Banking Committee," on ProPublica's website.

Let's Quit Sucking up to Wall Street!

Okay, I know that campaigns are expensive to run, that politicians running for office need money. I know that with the Supreme Court's Supremely Sucky decision on Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, huge amounts of Super Pac money are flowing into campaign coffers, and politicians hesitate to bite the golden hands that wave from the windows of Wall Street.  But, crap, will no one put country first and stand up for the millions of Americans who suffered and continue to suffer from the financial crisis of 2008?  Bill Clinton is praising the likes of Donald Trump and soft-soaping Wall Street, because, well, as Joan Walsh points out, Clinton's philanthropic enterprise depends upon deep pockets of the very rich. And I hear Republicans saying again and again that financial systems need LESS regulation--while again and again we learn more details of what inadequate regulation has done to us.

The latest reveal of the dirty tricks of finance? Top executives at Bank of America withheld from the bank's shareholders information that indicated how an acquisition of Merrill Lynch would negatively affect the organization:

Days before Bank of America shareholders approved the bank’s $50 billion purchase of Merrill Lynch in December 2008, top bank executives were advised that losses at the investment firm would most likely hammer the combined companies’ earnings in the years to come. But shareholders were not told about the looming losses...[snip]

....The bank’s purchase of Merrill, struck during the depths of the financial crisis, was the culmination of an acquisition binge by Mr. Lewis [CEO] that transformed Bank of America from its base in North Carolina into a financial behemoth that could compete head-to-head with the biggest institutions on Wall Street. 

But the transaction, which was ultimately encouraged by government officials who were concerned about the impact on the financial system of a foundering Merrill Lynch, also saddled the bank with billions in losses and required an additional $20 billion from taxpayers on top of an earlier bailout it received in 2008. [my emphasis] [from: Gretchen Morgenson, "Merrill Losses were Withheld before Bank of America Deal," The New York Times, 3 June 2012]

Jeffrey J. Brown, Bank of America's treasurer at the time, warned Joe L. Price, Bank of America's chief financial officer at the time, "that the failure to disclose [the extent of Merrill Lynch's losses to shareholders before the vote] 'could be a criminal offense, stating that he did not want to be ‘talking through a glass wall over a telephone’ if no disclosure was made.”["Merrill Losses were Withheld before Bank of America Deal"] Wow. How was Brown to know just how misplaced his fear of criminal charges was?  The SEC failed to prosecute those most responsible for the financial crisis--executives with Bank of America (which acquired Countrywide and Merrill Lynch), Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, etc., all those folks who continue to wield way too much power in this country.

In a blog post, Matt Taibbi, who has investigated and written extensively on the crimes of Wall Street, succinctly lists and describes those regulatory failures of the SEC: "SEC: Taking on Big Firms is 'Tempting,' but We Prefer Picking on Little Guys." Even when warned by insiders of massive fraud, the SEC failed to act. 

You can read Taibbi's article "How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform," on the Rolling Stone website, and you can sign up to join Matt Taibbi's "Thunderclap" here to add your tweet to the angry tweets of other citizens disgusted with how our government has let Wall Street get away with financial crimes and continue to use its influence to de-fang regulation meant to put the poison to malfeasance.

As Taibbi demonstrates in "How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform," the CEOs of those institutions, with their lawyers and their lobbyists, have way too much influence. Just look at what happened recently with J.P. Morgan. CEO Jamie Dimon and his aides were able to convince regulators to include loopholes in the regulatory laws passed after the financial crisis, laws that enabled J.P. Morgan to do the kind of risky trading that led to the bank's recent $2 billion loss. And don't count on shareholders to hold their executive officers responsible. Even after this latest crisis at J.P. Morgan (which had managed to escape damage in the 2008 financial meltdown), Jamie Dimon "survived a pair of key shareholder votes [on May 15th] on his pay and job responsibilities. [He] won an endorsement of his pay package, which was reportedly $23 million last year. He also can retain his second title as chair of the banking giant."

So don't believe anyone who says that Wall Street needs LESS regulation. Experience proves otherwise.

What Others Are Saying

Another hot day is warming up in South Louisiana, and we have a guest arriving this evening, providing he can get a flight on student standby, so this morning, I'm just linking to some posts and articles that caught my attention:

• Margaret Talbot opines about the Catholic Church's suing the Obama Administration over insurance coverage for birth control, in "Why is the Catholic Church Going to Court?," on The New Yorker website.  Bottom line:

  No one is challenging the rights of those Catholics who object to birth control to eschew it themselves, and to denounce it in public. But the lawsuit proposes something different: namely, that religious freedom means they can deny access to birth control to people who don’t share their faith or that article of it. It doesn’t.

• Heather Digby Parton, guest blogging for Kevin Drum, reflects my own cynicism about the lack of political will of our politicians in reigning in the power of Wall Street. (And now that the Supreme Court has added to the problem with its decision of Citizen's United, what little spine was left in our politicians has been, perhaps, permanently removed.) Adding to my depression about how Wall Street's trade in toxic derivatives screwed millions of Americans while the perpetrators of that financial disaster seem to have become even more politically powerful are these posts to which Parton links: Thomas Edsall's May 26th opinion piece in The New York Times and Mark Taibbi's article "How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform," in Rolling Stone. Here's a lovely quote from Taibbi's article:

  The fate of Dodd-Frank over the past two years is an object lesson in the government's inability to institute even the simplest and most obvious reforms, especially if those reforms happen to clash with powerful financial interests. From the moment it was signed into law, lobbyists and lawyers have fought regulators over every line in the rulemaking process. Congressmen and presidents may be able to get a law passed once in a while – but they can no longer make sure it stays passed. You win the modern financial-regulation game by filing the most motions, attending the most hearings, giving the most money to the most politicians and, above all, by keeping at it, day after day, year after fiscal year, until stealing is legal again.

• A recent study suggests that exercise may actually hurt some folks with heart risks, as Gina Kolata reports in her New York Time's article, "For Some, Exercise May Increase Heart Risk," 30 May 2012. Oh, well. We know we all are going to die, anyway, right? No sweat.
  
  
  
• I'll end with this great Pig at the Trough homage to a Ronald Reagan ad (and a poke at Wall Street) that James Fallows shares this morning on his blog: "The Bear vs. the Pig: A Great Reagan Ad Updated."
  
  ....things to do.....
 

oh, and "oink, oink": "Honeywell CEO Says the Corporate Tax Rate Should be Zero"

Cynicism Redux

I've been following the debt ceiling debate with growing--and now matured--cynicism. Today, House Minority Leader Harry Reid has evidently offered the Republicans a debt plan that includes $2.7 million in spending cuts, with no new taxes, with the stipulation that the debt ceiling be raised through 2012. (h/t Brian Beutler at TPM). As Matt Yglesias points out, however, the House Republicans don't want to accept this plan that nominally meets their publicly stated requirements because it doesn't repeal Medicare and it doesn't take future tax increases off the table. The Bush tax cuts are supposed to expire in 2012:

In particular, the plan doesn’t cut Medicare, which means that Democratic party candidates for office in November 2012 and 2014 can accurately remind voters of the content of the Republican budget plan. In case you forgot, this plans repeals Medicare. Having repealed Medicare, it then gives seniors vouchers to purchase more expensive private health insurance. And having replaced Medicare with a voucher system, it then ensures that the vouchers will grow steadily stingier over time. It was only after voting for this plan that Republicans seem to have realized that repealing Medicare is unpopular. Since that time, they’ve been trying to entrap Democrats into reaching some kind of Medicare détente with them, which would immunize them from criticism. Reid’s plan doesn’t do that. "Harry Reid Calls House Republicans' Bluff"

Politicians hope that people won't REALLY understand what they're up to: Repealing Medicare is unpopular with the American people, so Republicans have tried to sell their voucher plan. Yet the Republican voucher plan for Medicare will increase costs for old folks and thus result in denial of services. Republicans hope that no one will notice the switcheroo in their plan. (Ca-ching--another coin in the cynicism bank)

And, dang it, those tax cuts are SUPPOSED to expire. Not only that, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "middle-income Americans are now paying federal taxes at or near historically low levels, according to the latest available data. That’s true whether it comes to their federal income taxes or their total federal taxes." "Federal Income Taxes on Middle-Income Families at Historically Low Levels."

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities also points out just what is responsible for our current debt crisis:

If not for the Bush tax cuts, the deficit-financed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the effects of the worst recession since the Great Depression (including the cost of policymakers’ actions to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term. By themselves, in fact, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for almost half of the $20 trillion in debt that, under current policies, the nation will owe by 2019. The stimulus law and financial rescues will account for less than 10 percent of the debt at that time. "Economic Downturn and Bush Policies Continue to Drive Large Projected Deficits"

And a graph in the New York Times handily compares the results of new budget policies under Bush and Obama, based on data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: "Policy Changes Under Two Presidents"--A $5.07 trillion increase under Bush and a $1.44 trillion increase under Obama.

As Steve Benen points out: "And now these same Republicans [who helped turn a large surplus into a massive deficit] claim the high ground on fiscal issues, and demand that President Obama clean up their mess immediately. Worse, they demand he do so in a way they find pleasing, or next week, they’ll crash the economy on purpose." "Blame Where Blame is Due"

Kevin Drum describes the Republican narrative that too many people are buying into:

Up until very recently, Republicans were mostly taking a hard line on the deficit and weren't shy about making sure everyone knew it. The hard line itself hasn't changed since then, but over the past few weeks they've come to realize that it doesn't make for very good PR. So now their enablers in the media are furiously pushing the story that it's really Obama who's completely intransigent and insincere, rejecting deal after deal no matter how much Republicans try to accomodate his crazed desire to punish the rich. This narrative, as near as I can tell, is now virtually unanimous among conservative commenters.

So the question is, will anyone buy this? It's so self-evidently preposterous that it doesn't seem possible, but then, I wouldn't have figured that they could successfully make the world so quickly forget that they were responsible for the deficit in the first place, nor that they were also responsible for the most epic financial meltdown since the Great Depression. But they have. Their ability to shape popular narratives can hardly be underestimated. "Republicans and the Deficit Narrative"

It's amazing to me that anyone still takes these Republicans seriously. Oh, I know that there are conservatives who are speaking out against the rash policies of these radicals, but those folks aren't in power.

It's like a bunch of whiny kids who trashed a house at a party. Another group of kids come in to clean up and have to buy supplies to do so. The ones responsible for the mess then scream about the costs of the clean-up and convince bystanders that the clean-up crew is responsible for all the costs and damages. Unbelievable.

Worth Reading

Frank Rich lets loose: "Obama's Original Sin," in New York Magazine's "News and Features," 3 July 2011.

This article would be great to use in a communications class in which one is discussing the art of rhetoric (ethos, logos, and pathos) and the emotional appeal of language (buried metaphors such as "paw print," alliteration, understatement, hyperbole, aphorisms, etc.)

A few excerpts:

• "As the indefatigable Matt Taibbi has tabulated, law enforcement on Obama’s watch rounded up 393,000 illegal immigrants last year and zero bankers."

• "It's as if the Watergate investigation were halted after the cops nabbed the nudniks who did the break-in."

• "What some call a settlement others may find a cover-up."

• "Those in executive suites at the top of that chain have long since fled the scene with the proceeds, while bleeding shareholders, investors, homeowners, and ­cashiered employees were left with the bills. The weak Dodd-Frank financial-reform law that rose from the ruins remains largely inoperative, since the actual rule-writing was delegated to understaffed agencies now under siege by banking lobbyists and their well-greased congressional overlords." (my emphasis--Just listen to the hard "R's" rolling through the first part of that last sentence, only to be let out like air from a tire, with the emphasis on "S's" at the end of the sentence.)

• And--ouch!: "But the president has no one to blame but himself for the caricature. While he has never lusted after money—he’d rather get his hands on the latest novel by Morrison or Franzen—he is an elitist of a certain sort. For all the lurid fantasies of the birthers, the dirty secret of Obama’s background is that the values of Harvard, not of Kenya or Indonesia or Bill Ayers, have most colored his governing style. He falls hard for the best and the brightest white guys."

And the final two paragraphs that one hopes the President (or someone who can influence him) reads and heeds:

“A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous,” Obama declared at his inauguration. What he said on that bright January morning is no less true or stirring now. For all his failings since, he is the only one who can make this case. There’s nothing but his own passivity to stop him from doing so—and from shaking up the administration team that, well beyond the halfway-out-the-door Geithner and his Treasury Department, has showered too many favors on the prosperous. This will mean turning on his own cadre of the liberal elite. But it’s essential if he is to call the bluff of a fake man-of-the-people like Romney. To differentiate himself from the discredited Establishment, he will have to mount the fight he has ducked for the past three years.

The alternative is a failure of historic proportions. Those who gamed the economy to near devastation—so much so that the nation turned to an untried young leader in desperation and in hope—would once again inherit the Earth. Unless and until there’s a purging of the crimes that brought our president to his unlikely Inauguration Day, much more in America than the second term of his administration will be at stake.

Depressing if True

William Greider, writing for The Nation, seems to think that while Republicans have certainly done their best to demonize Elizabeth Warren, there are folks surrounding President Barack Obama who also don't want this candid woman to chair the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Greider's information relies on a Very Reliable Source, unnamed, so who can really tell how accurate this is. But based on what I've read about the financial industry and how all those finance guys seem to end up in positions of power around the presidency (including Obama's), I wouldn't be surprised. Here's a quote from Greider:

Tim Geithner, said my Very Reliable Source, really, really doesn’t want Elizabeth Warren in the position where she is sure to be a tough-minded and independent voice on major financial-policy issues. As CFPB director, Warren would also sit on the new “systemic risk” council of regulators who decide very large questions like “too big to fail.” The other regulators can outvote her easily enough, but Warren has an alarming history of personal candor. She says what she thinks, out loud and in public. That naturally disturbs the club members, all of whom have a rank history of making life easier for the big boys of banking.

Warren made her integrity clear when she served as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel digging into the financial crisis and bailouts. Her investigations turned up alarming facts the bankers and bank regulators wished to avoid. Furthermore, Warren was often dissenting on legislative issues Geithner and team were pushing in the congressional debates on financial reform. Geithner doesn’t tolerate contrary thinkers in his midst; witness the galaxy of Wall Streeters he recruited to run the Treasury department. Geithner is a favorite of the president’s, perhaps because he is absolutely faithful to the financial establishment’s best interests. [William Greider, "Why is Obama Dragging his Heels on Appointing Elizabeth Warren to head CPFB?," The Nation, 27 May 2011.]

I don't know the answer to the question in the title of Greider's article, and I'm no expert. But I've read enough about the economic crisis to know that we can't blame just one political party for all the deregulation that eventually led to the risks that the financial industry took and the financial crisis that ensued. Those at the top seem to cover each other's backs very well. Just sayin'.

David Corn, an editor for Mother Jones and a former editor of The Nation, described the distance between Timothy Geithner and Elizabeth Warren in this article on HuffPost's "Politics Daily," in 2010. Here is a quote from Corn's article: "Elizabeth Warren Vs. Timothy Geithner: A Big Decision for Obama."

As head of the bailout oversight panel, Warren has fiercely called out Geithner and Treasury on a number of fronts: for providing a backdoor bailout to AIG, for botching homeowner relief programs, for failing to get mega-banks to resume lending. Moreover, she's an articulate and thoughtful populist, who applies a Main Street-first perspective toward financial matters and who has been a scourge of credit card companies and banks. Geithner is a member of the Big Finance establishment; he's no crusader.

It would be nice to have an "articulate and thoughtful populist" on one's side.

No Consequences for Bad Behavior; Little Regulation to Prevent It

For a long time I have been thinking--almost brooding--over the global financial crisis. Before 2007, I hadn't thought much about Wall Street though I had read my share of news articles over the years about the power of Wall Street and was passingly concerned about the influence of that power over our elected officials. With the financial meltdown in 2008, however, I began paying much more attention to financial and economic news. Nothing in my background--poet, teacher of literature and writing, gardener, art car enthusiast--prepared me for such an interest. I certainly knew nothing about derivatives. But the financial meltdown has enough sturm und drang for any engaging narrative of greed and corruption, tragedy and despair. And when the narrative touches one's own life, well, it does make one sit up and pay attention, doesn't it?

After reading numerous articles and blog posts about the crisis, after watching PBS Frontline specials and Charles Ferguson's documentary Inside Job (now available through Netflix), I think I can say with some confidence that the rats who almost blew up the world as we know it are still on the ship. Nor have they been caught and brought to trial and punished for their bad behavior. Nope. Some are at the helm of the ship. Others are cocooned on islands of privilege and are enjoying their millions.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans have been laid off, are out of work, can't find work, have lost their homes, are in danger of losing their homes, can't afford a college education or to pursue their dreams of owning a business. Ordinary Americans have bailed out the banks and the bastards who brought us to the brink--yet our elected leaders are trying to cut the very benefits that would prevent many Americans from suffering an impoverished and miserable old age. We can afford to save Goldman Sachs and Fannie Mae but not Medicare or Medicaid. We can regulate a woman's uterus but not the financial market.

Today, in The Washington Post, Ezra Klein points out that "though the financial crisis remains lodged in our minds, and in our jobless rates," our elected officials are not confirming leaders to help regulate the financial institutions that caused the crisis:

... [T]he Federal Reserve lacks a vice chairman for banking supervision. There’s no one officially in charge of the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research. The seat marked “insurance” on Financial Stability Oversight Council is empty. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has a leader but not a director. No one has been confirmed to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. And Republicans are still saying Nobel Prize-winning economist Peter Diamond is underqualified to serve on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors." "If it can go wrong, it will go wrong. And it'll be our fault," The Washington Post, 24 May 2011.

And, in their over-the-cliff plans to cut the deficit, "the House GOP is fighting to starve financial regulators of the resources they need to do their work." As Klein points out, we have a deficit because of the financial crisis, and we have a financial crisis because of a lack of regulation, and we're not funding regulation because we have a deficit. See some circular reasoning on the part of our leaders?

How to respond to such idiocy? With cynicism, says Kevin Drum (well, actually, he says the situation overwhelms his own cynicism):

It's this, more than anything else, that has convinced me over the past couple of years that America's wealthy class is simply morally bankrupt and that the leadership of the Republican Party is politically bankrupt. Five years ago I would have been embarrassed to write a blog post suggesting that this might be the reaction of the moneyed class to an economic collapse. Then we had one and this was the reaction. Once again, events have outrun my best efforts to be cynical.

It's certainly with cynicism that I listened to Dave Davies interview Gretchen Morgenson on NPR's Fresh Air today. Morgenson, who writes about finance for The New York Times, has just published a book she co-wrote with Joshua Rosner: Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon. In this book, Morgenson "focuses on the managers of Fannie Mae, the government supported mortgage giant." Like the later financial players of Wall Street--Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, et alia--the managers of Fannie Mae pursued deals that enriched them and that weakened regulatory oversight. But lest listeners think these details support the Republican narrative that the financial crisis was all due to mortgage defaults, to the government's "meddling in the market" in its determination to "push home ownership" to people who couldn't afford it, Morgenson adds that "Wall Street was not a passive player." Had regulators done their due diligence, had there been rigorous oversight, we would not be in the economic situation that we're in now.

And it's certainly with cynicism that I read today that the Tea-Party backed candidates who were elected because of the anger people felt toward the bailouts and Wall Street shenanigans "are now pushing pro-Wall Street legislation" and that "[t]he 10 Republican freshmen on the House Financial Services Committee have taken in nearly $600,000 from the financial industry since Election Day, according to the Sunlight Foundation." ["Tea-Partiers Swept in on Anti-Wall Street Wave Now Pushing Deregulation," Ryan J. Reilly, TPMMuckraker, 24 May 2011.]

To maintain that realistic and appropriate level of cynicism, I am creating here a list of articles to read (or re-read) and documentaries to view (or re-view) on the financial crisis, on who took us there (a bipartisan ride), who abandoned us, who profited, who suffered, and why it's probably gonna happen again. (in no particular order except that I'm working backward from today and jumping around locating articles I remember reading and identifying others I haven't read but which look promising)

• Marian Wang, "Cheat Sheet on Bank Investigations and the Probes that have Petered Out," ProPublica: Journalism in the Public Interest, 24 May 2011.
• Matt Taibbi, "The People versus Goldman Sachs," Rolling Stone, 11 May 2011.
• Matt Taibbi, "The Great American Bubble Machine," Rolling Stone 5 April 2010.
• Brian Beutler, "One-Time Warren Foe Now Pressuring Obama to Give Her Recess Appointment to Head Consumer Bureau," TPMDC 23 May 2011.
• Ben Protess, "Warren and Republicans Spar Over Bureau's Power," DealBook, in The New York Times, 24 May 2011.
• Katrina vanden Heuvel, "Why Obama Should Appoint Elizabeth Warren,", in The Washington Post, 24 May 2011.
• The Reckoning--a series of articles published in The New York Times that "explored the causes of the financial crisis of 2008." The series includes these articles, among others: Peter S. Goodman and Gretchen Morgenson, "Saying Yes, WaMu Built Empire on Shaky Loans," 28 December 2008; Jo Becker, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, and Stephen Labaton, "White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire," 21 December 2008; Louise Story, "On Wall Street, Bonuses, not Profits, were Real," 18 December 2008; Eric Lipton and Raymond Hernandez, "A Champion of Wall Street Reaps Benefits," 14 December 2008; Peter S. Goodman, "Taking a Hard New Look at Greenspan Legacy," 9 October 2008.
• Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein, "The Magnetar Trade: How One Hedge Fund Helped Keep the Housing Bubble Going," ProPublica, 9 April 2010.
• Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger, "The 'Subsidy': How Merrill Lynch Traders Helped Blow up Their Own Firm," ProPublica 22 December 2010.--Or read the series of ProPublica's investigative articles on the financial crisis here: "The Wall Street Money Machine."
• Oh, and this little post is sort of funny: Did Porn Cause the Financial Crisis?", posted 23 April 2010, by Daniel Indiviglio, associate editor at The Atlantic.
• Jack Dolan, Rob Barry, Matthew Haggman, "Borrowers Betrayed," Miami Herald, 2009--series on the Florida mortgage industry and the lack of regulation oversight that led to criminals being granted state licenses.
• Dean Starkman, of Columbia Journalism Review provides a list of worthy articles on the financial crisis: "No Pulitzers, But Here's an Audie", posted 21 April 2009.
• "The Warning," a Frontline report on Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during the Clinton administration, who tried to warn the economic power-brokers of the potential for economic meltdown if the derivatives market was not regulated. As of this writing, the full video can be watched online. DVDs are also available for purchase from PBS.(air date, 20 October 2009)
• Frontline's "Inside the Meltdown," first aired on 17 February 2009, at this writing, can be viewed entirely online on the PBS website. Or just go to the webpage that includes links to all the Frontline videos that are available online: "Watch Frontline Online".
• Michael Lewis, "Wall Street on the Tundra," Vanity Fair, April 2009--Unfortunately, this article is no longer fully available on Vanity Fair's website, but I found a .pdf version elsewhere, "Wall Street on the Tundra", that might still be accessible. This is the article that really got me interested in the details of the financial crisis. I remember reading it shortly after it was published online.
• Kevin Hall, "Mortgage Crisis Shows Why Financial Regulation is Needed", McClatchy, 1 November 2009. And you can see all the stories and videos that resulted from McClatchy's five-month investigation into Goldman Sachs here: McClatchy Newspapers, investigation into Goldman Sach's contributions to the economic crisis.
• Paul Solman interviews Charles Ferguson, director of Inside Job. In the interview, Ferguson talks about undisclosed ties and conflicts of interest in the financial relationships between academics in economics departments and the financial sector.

This is a short list of all one can find on the economic crisis online. I didn't include articles from The Wall Street Journal because I'm not a subscriber and am therefore unable to access them. Most of the sources on this list are not locked behind a subscription wall--except for, perhaps, The New York Times articles--because I do subscribe to the online version of The New York Times.

--so little time, so many opportunities for corruption.....