The NY Times yesterday finally ran a front page story indicting the Federal Reserve Bank and regulatory agencies for looking the other way as the subprime crisis developed. The Tims did not investigate its own coverage or the lack of coverage of others.

The Fed in turn tried to shift the focus on a new home morgage measure they have adopted;’

Fed endorses home mortgage protections - Yahoo! News

QUOTE OF THE DAY: ECONOMIST JOSEPH STIGLITZ

Some portion of the damage done by the Bush administration could be rectified quickly. A large portion will take decades to fix - and that’s assuming the political will to do so exists both in the White House and in Congress. Think of the interest we are paying, year after year, on the almost $4 trillion of increased debt burden - even at 5 percent, that’s an annual payment of $200 billion, two Iraq wars a year forever. Think of the taxes that future governments will have to levy to repay even a fraction of the debt we have accumulated. And think of the widening divide between rich and poor in America, a phenomenon that goes beyond economics and speaks to the very future of the American Dream.

In short, there’s a momentum here that will require a generation to reverse. Decades hence we should take stock, and revisit the conventional wisdom. Will Herbert Hoover still deserve his dubious mantle? I’m guessing that George W. Bush will have earned one more grim superlative.

CRISIS HAVING A GLOBAL IMPACT

Few people knew at the start of 2007 the meaning of “subprime” real estate loans or how they might affect the US and global economies.

Today, worries are growing that the crisis that began with mortgage failures and spread to banks and brokerages may push the US economy into adownturn and put the entire global economy at risk.

REPORT FROM KATRINA LAND; REPORT FROM NEW ORLEANS

By Kevin Berends and Tyler Westbrook, WHYnotNews

New Orleans, LA December 16, 2007— A week after arriving in New Orleans to cover the events William Quigley described in his call to action that laid out the details of the severe housing crisis still affecting New Orleans 2-1/2 years after the city was struck by Hurricane Katrina, many irregularities remain surrounding Mayor Ray Nagin’s policies on the homeless, the displaced and the disenfranchised. Having stayed in a number of places that would probably scare most white people (we can say this because it scared us a little, being a couple middle class white boys) there is the sense of unfamiliarity and uneasiness at being out of one’s element, but it is larger and much more foreboding than that. We were struck by the eerie and palpably obscene juxtaposition of people in expensive suits coming and going to City Hall in downtown New Orleans, while literally across the street was a scene directly out of the Grapes of Wrath with people living in tents, under blankets, cardboard and in some cases, even less than that.

We ourselves stayed with the homeless overnight, sleeping on cardboard, in the rain, in Duncan Square Plaza. It’s a little park directly across the street from the mayor’s office in city hall. What we saw and smelled and heard would disgust most people, especially those who live there. Almost unbelievably, many of these people hold full time jobs, have always held jobs and have never asked for a handout but, because of the severe housing shortage and skyrocketing rent, can no longer afford housing. We watched them returning from work in clean white shirts and neat pants and clean shoes only to hole up inside their tent after dark.

We also stayed with a man who would frighten some people because, a) he is a black man, b) he lives in a small, landlord neglected first floor apartment in the hood and c) he is HIV positive. He isn’t just any black man, having run for mayor in 2006. He served as a corrections officer, he’s a veteran and he is an activist. But these are not what make him exceptional. It isn’t even that he was locked inside a cell in downtown New Orleans during Katrina. There were thousands of other inmates, many who were being held on trivial offenses and, while they were never charged, they were nevertheless left there to drown in the foul, poisonous, sewage and chemically contaminated waters of Katrina by prison guards who left them locked inside flooding cells without so much as a parting insult before the guards headed for home and safety. Most of the inmates here are African Americans. So it is not his ethnicity that makes him stand out. What makes him exceptional is that he had absolutely no business being arrested in the first place.

In instance after instance we have encountered local people who tell us that police violence, discrimination and brutality are rampant here