President Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson address reporters after meeting to discuss the economy and the Citicorp bailout, saying if needed, such assistance may be offered again in the future.
He also added that he has been in close contact with President-elect Obama and the transition team.
Key lawmakers have reported an agreement in principle on a bailout of the financial industry designed to avert a deeper economic crisis, reports the AP.
Emerging from a two-hour negotiating session, Sen. Chris Dodd said, “We are very confident that we can act expeditiously.”
The White House has conceded on certain points of the $700 billion financial bailout plan by limiting the pay packages of Wall Street executives whose companies would benefit from the proposed bailout.
“The American people are angry about executive compensation and rightfully so,” Paulson told the House Financial Services Committee.
Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. met with anger at today’s Senate Banking Committee where he tried to persuade Congress “to enact this bill quickly and cleanly, and avoid slowing it down with other provisions that are unrelated or don’t have broad support.”
But after hours of back-and-forth they rejected the administration’s plan. “What they have sent us is not acceptable,” the committee chairman, Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, told The Associated Press.
Today, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson urged Congress to pass a $700 billion financial bailout. They warned that letting problems persist would have dire consequences for the national economy, reports the AP.
“If financial conditions fail to improve for a protracted period, the implications for the broader economy could be quite adverse,” Bernanke says in his prepared for a panel being held later today.
It was a bad day again on the stock market as investors were unnerved by the governments plan to buy $700 billion in banks’ mortgage debt.
Stocks fell sharply, taking the Dow Jones industrials down more than 370 points.
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Democrats are pushing back on the bailout planoffered by the Bush Administration, specifically with legislation that would cut the salaries of the CEO’s whose firms participate in the bailout and by adding more oversight provisions, reports The Washington Post.
Today, the Bush administration sketched out a multi-faceted effort to confront the financial crisis. The program could cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars to buy up bad mortgages and other toxic debt that has unhinged Wall Street, reports the AP.
Bush acknowledged that the program will put a “significant amount of taxpayers’ money on the line.”
Wall Street bounced back today shooting the Dow Jones industrials up more than 400 points after a report that the federal government may create an entity that will take over banks’ bad debt, reports CNBC.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is considering forming an entity like the one that was set up after the failure of savings and loan banks in the 1980s.
