Beware of national averages like “One in Four Borrowers Is Underwater.” The problem is heavily concentrated in places like Phoenix, where 54% of homeowners with mortgages have negative equity. That’s about half a million underwater mortgages, more than the combined totals in Texas and New York state, where 10...

Elliott Spitzer got it wrong, as did Paul Krugman, and countless bloggers. The popular narrative – that Tim Geithner needlessly favored the interests of banks over those of taxpayers – does not withstand close scrutiny. No one noticed that Inspector General Neil Barofsky’s report on the AIG bailout excluded key facts...

John Paulson was dissatisfied. The marketplace had not satiated his appetite for placing bets against subprime mortgage securities.  So he cooked up a scheme to issue billions more in new securities designed by him to fail. The scheme worked, and his hedge fund earned billions.

The most interesting part of 

If actions speak louder than words, then Edolphus Towns didn't feel like much of a VIP at Countrywide Financial. In 2003 the Brooklyn congressman got two five-year adjustable rate mortgages, for his New York and Florida residences, from the nation’s largest mortgage lender. But Towns never waited for the interest...

“Turn the water back on!” exhorts Sean Hannity, 14 times or so, despite the fact that no one turned the water off. His mendacious catchphrase was repeated seven more times by teabagging flunkies in the faux documentary, “The Valley Hope Forgot.”  The word “drought” was uttered by Hannity exactly...

“Obama's selling of ‘reform’ qualifies as high-class hucksterism,” writes Newsweek’s Robert Samuelson, who, like South Carolina’s Joe Wilson or David Brooks, knows a thing or two about dishonesty.

To impugn Obama, Samuelson cites a study prepared by the subsidiary of an insurance company, United Health Care.  The...

David Brooks is very slick. His lies and deceptions are embedded into parenthetical asides or subordinate clauses, and frequently couched in the jargon of the social sciences. His affect on television is neither doctrinaire nor mean-spirited, like that of his former colleagues, Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes.  Brooks’ dishonesty is...

A trillion dollars is not what it used to be, which is why any regulator concerned about moral hazard has his work cut out for him.

Twenty-one banks have trillion-plus balance sheets, according to Bankersalmanac.com. Of those, only three are based in the U.S.* Forty banks hold assets...

Karl Rove can't help himself. The more he talks the more he suggests that he's guilty as sin. His throw-crap-against-the-wall-and-hope-it-sticks piece in The Wall Street Journal constitutes his latest non-denial about corrupt dealings with the Justice Department.

Rove gives himself away in his nonsensical lies regarding the inquiry into...

It was one of those ugly Washington stories that everybody knows about but almost nobody talks about. Joe Scarborough, to his credit, went on the record. In his 2004 Washington memoir, Rome Wasn't Burnt in a Day, Scarborough provides a chilling portrait of the man who leads FreedomWorks,...

There are a couple of factual defects with this Associated Press lede:

Despite their denials, influential Democratic Sens. Kent Conrad and Chris Dodd were told from the start they were getting VIP mortgage discounts from one of the nation's largest lenders, the official who handled their loans has...

On December 22, 2008, Congressman Darrell Issa's staff interviewed Robert Feinberg, the fabulist "whistleblower" who accuses Chris Dodd and other Democrats of receiving "sweetheart deals" on their home mortgages with Countywide Financial. Feinberg's statements, plus the confidential company documents that he stole and handed over to Issa, represent the...

There's definitive, ironclad proof that Senator Dodd's accuser has been lying from the start. The entire Countrywide VIP loan scandal is predicated on the flimsy recollections of this liar, named Robert Feinberg. Luckily for Feinberg and some Republican hit men, some less-than-professional reporters like Larry Margasak 
of the Associated...

If you make $1 million a year, the impact of the proposed health care surcharge is a blip, a rounding error. If you make less, the impact is disproportionately smaller. Only a tiny percentage of millionaires -- not those people whose net worth exceeds $1 million, only people whose annual...

Hank Paulson could not keep his story straight during his nonstop dissembling session before Congress. When asked why the government did not step in to avert a Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, Paulson said, "We were unable to find any buyer to come in and make the acquisition on an assisted basis...

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., has a "Low-cost Clean Energy Plan" being marketed to people with substandard reading skills. His press release claims his plan to build 100 nuclear power plants will "lower utility bills," though it "should not add to the federal budget since ratepayers will pay for building...

Sarah Palin follows in the footsteps of Susan Molinari, who 12 years ago set a precedent for other GOP leaders such as Newt Gingrich, Dennis Hastert, Trent Lott, Richard Baker and Joe Scarborough. These elected officials all quit before their terms of office expired. None of them left to take...

"What is really behind the mushrooming rate of mortgage foreclosures since 2007?" asked Professor Stan Liebowitz of the University of Texas, Dallas on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. His answer might have seemed revelatory to someone utterly bereft of common sense. After studying a huge...

"During the floor debate this morning over the historic American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) received a round of applause from GOP colleagues when he claimed that man-made global warming is a 'hoax' with 'no scientific consensus.'' ThinkProgress, June 26, 2009

One of the...

"A Daring Trade Has Wall Street Seething," is a simplified case study into the pitfalls of credit default swaps. Nobody, including The Wall Street Journal's reporters, could figure out exactly what was going on. The transaction, illustrated by Journal below, involved sophisticated players who ostensibly knew what they were...