The quick answer to the headline question is: both. Senator Warren is extremely annoying to the folks who don’t like her attempts to regulate the financial services industry. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
By The Huffington Post News Editors
The Obama administration and Congress are not helping students, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) charged Wednesday, reaping record profits off the federal student loan program that a regulator said has finally surpassed $1 trillion in overall debt.
The federal government is due to book $51 billion in profit this year off new and existing federal student loans, according to estimates by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The record amount brings the government’s profit haul to nearly $120 billion over the past five years, according to CBO forecasts and Department of Education budget documents. The CBO estimates that the government will generate $184 billion in profit for new loans made this fiscal year through 2023.
“Instead of helping our students, the government is making a profit on student loans,” Warren said of the profit figures during a conference filled with young people. “That is wrong. It is morally wrong. That is obscene.”
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More on Student Loans
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Huffington Post
State Dining Room
11:04 A.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Well, for decades, the middle class in this country was the engine that powered the economy, and that allowed us to all grow together. Hard work paid off. Responsibility was rewarded. It was that basic bargain that made this country great — that no matter who you are or where you came from, you could make it if you put in enough blood, sweat and tears.
But over time, a winner-take-all philosophy began to take hold and it delivered huge rewards to those at the very top, but left everybody else working harder and harder just to stay afloat. A lot of families took on more debt just to keep up. Mortgages were sold that people really didn’t understand and, in some cases, couldn't afford. The financial sector was able to make huge bets with other people’s money. And that strain of irresponsibility eventually came crashing down on all of us.
Now, I ran for President to restore that basic bargain. I ran because I believed that our economy works best not from the top down, but from the middle out and from the bottom up, where you’ve got a rising, thriving middle class and ladders of opportunity for everybody.
So four years ago, even as we were working on restoring the economy and dealing with the immediate crisis, we also wanted to figure out how do we set new rules for the road to make sure that a few bad apples in the financial sector couldn't break the law, or cheat consumers, or put the entire economy at risk.
And I was fortunate even when I was running for President to have some friends like Elizabeth Warren, who had already done a lot of academic work on this and had a whole series of ideas about how we might start making sure that consumers were treated better, and as a consequence, take some of the risk out of the system. And because of those conversations and that work, and because of some terrific efforts by other members in Congress, we were able, for the time in history, to get a consumer watchdog on the job — to look out for the interests of everyday Americans. And I am very proud to say that last night, Rich Cordray was finally confirmed — (laughter) — by the United States Senate to keep serving as America’s consumer watchdog and as the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. So we’re very pleased about that. (Applause.)
I first nominated Rich for this position two years ago this week. (Laughter.) He was eminently qualified. He had the support of Democrats and Republicans from across the country. A majority of state attorneys general from both parties — Rich’s former colleagues — called on him to be confirmed. And for two years, Republicans in the Senate refused to give Rich a simple yes-or-no …read more
You often hear calls for a higher minimum wage defended by appealing to how much higher the minimum wage would be if it had grown as fast as X. These people seem to think they are making the case for a higher minimum wage, but in fact they are proving something very different. Elizabeth Warren provided a recent example of this when she argued that if the minimum wage kept pace with productivity it would be at $22 today. Here is how she put it: If we started in 1960 and we said that as productivity goes up, that is as workers are producing more, then the minimum wage is going to go up the same. And if that were the case then the minimum wage today would be about $22 an hour… What she appears to want us to take away from this is that “wow the minimum wage should be a lot higher”. But no serious economist thinks that a $22 minimum wage wouldn’t increase unemployment significantly. Or at least they aren’t saying this out loud. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, already an experienced author, has a lot more to write about.
By The Huffington Post News Editors
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) made a case for increasing the minimum wage last week during a Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions hearing, in which she cited a study that suggested the federal minimum wage would have stood at nearly $22 an hour today if it had kept up with increased rates in worker productivity.
“If we started in 1960 and we said that as productivity goes up, that is as workers are producing more, then the minimum wage is going to go up the same. And if that were the case then the minimum wage today would be about $22 an hour,” she said, speaking to Dr. Arindrajit Dube, a University of Massachusetts Amherst professor who has studied the economic impacts of minimum wage. “So my question is Mr. Dube, with a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, what happened to the other $14.75? It sure didn’t go to the worker.”
Dube went on to note that if minimum wage incomes had grown over that period at the same pace as it had for the top 1 percent of income earners, the minimum wage would actually be closer to $33 an hour than the current $7.25.
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More on minimum wage
By Jeff @ Another Political Blog
Washington, D.C. is filled with stupid people. From the people we elect to the people who are there trying to get something from the people we elect. But I have to give this Stupidest Politician Award to Elizabeth Warren. Yes, I gave it to the supposed part Native American for a good reason. Earlier this fair weekend, she said “The government not only has a right to regulate the American people, but regulation is really the key to the country’s success,”. Just to recap, she means that when the government releases more regulations, more people become successful.
Now we examine that. When do businesses benefit from more government regulation? You tell me, cause I’ve yet to hear of such. Only the people that push for these kind of regulations come up with it. When government regulators come up with more and more regulations, your freedoms and liberties are shrunk. Not expanded. If you truly think that some government regulation will not restrict your freedoms in any way, then you honestly have never paid attention to reality. Think about this; a 13 year old has his little hot dog stand shut down due to a zoning violation. In Santa Monica, your not even allowed to smoke in your apartment or condo. And of course, if you or a child you know runs a small little lemonade stand, you could be shut done for not having the correct permits. What’s wrong with a small little lemonade stand? What’s wrong with a kid wanting to help those exhausted warm people walking down the street on a hot summer day? You tell me, because once again, I still find no wrong.
Please, tell me why American Business owners owe their success to the government, which forces them to buy certain things or build stuff via a certain process, which costs them more money. Government regulations make it harder to innovate, to make things easier to use, to modernize, and to grow. You can’t make a product faster when the government tells you you have to build this or that the way they say, and you can’t change any part of it. Government regulations harm people. They harm businesses, and they only make it harder to improve the economy which isn’t going to get better with more regulations.
By John Reeves, The Motley Fool
Filed under: Investing
During a meeting in 2009 about the performance of the Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, Elizabeth Warren, who was head of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, kept challenging Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner about the program’s lack of progress in helping homeowners. At one point, an exasperated Geithner blurted out: “We estimate that they [the banks] can handle 10 million foreclosures, over time. This program will foam the runway for them.”
The expression “foam the runway” is often used to refer to the injecting of cash into a company that’s about to go bankrupt, which is somewhat similar in principle to an airport spreading fire-suppression foam on a runway to minimize the effects of an emergency landing. What Geithner was actually saying here was that home-mortgage modifications were helping the banks by preventing all of the likely foreclosures from hitting the banking system at precisely the same time. HAMP would ultimately allow the banks to spread out the foreclosures, while they restored their financial strength with government bailouts.
Now it all makes sense
Just as Geithner uttered those words, the full meaning of the bailout of Wall Street‘s banks became crystal clear to Neil Barofsky, who was the special inspector general for TARP. Geithner was being asked about how HAMP was helping homeowners, but he responded by saying how the program would help the banks. Barofsky now understood completely that it didn’t matter if the modifications failed or if struggling borrowers ended up worse off, as long as the banks could “stretch out their pain until their profits returned.”
Barofsky describes his epiphany in his outstanding Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street. The book’s central argument is that all of the bailouts resulting from the financial crisis were ultimately designed to benefit the big Wall Street banks, and the interests of homeowners, auto dealers, and other ordinary Americans didn’t receive similar concern or attention. Barofsky, who was once a very effective prosecutor, builds an extremely detailed and compelling case against the government. I suspect that most readers will come away extremely angry about the fundamental unfairness of these bailouts.
The simple thesis that bailing out the big Wall Street banks was the overwhelming priority of the U.S. government in response to the financial crisis explains a lot. Why, for example, have there been so few criminal prosecutions related to the crisis? In a recent editorial in the Financial Times, Barofsky notes that there “would be no criminal prosecutions while the banks still teetered on the brink of collapse.” He continued: “The risk of causing them to fail, and thereby undoing all of the bailout efforts, was too high.”
And why did the ill-conceived HAMP fail so abysmally? An aggressive attempt to assist homeowners could have had adverse effects on the big banks, which would possibly, of course, put some of those institutions in jeopardy.
The …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wants Massachusetts Sen.-elect Elizabeth Warren to join the Banking Committee.
Source: Fox News – Politics
