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CBS' Sharyl Attkisson and ABC's Bianna Golodryga both filed updates on the financial meltdown that exacerbated the recession. ABC's Golodryga picked up on a probe entitled No Rhyme or Reason by Andrew Cuomo, the Attorney General of New York State, into bonuses paid to executives at the eight biggest banks to receive federal bailouts from the Treasury Department's TARP. CBS' Attkisson gave us a Follow the Money expose into sweetheart loans made by Countrywide Financial to inside-the-Beltway powerbrokers.
The Countrywide program was a VIP rewards system for preferred customers dubbed Friends of Angelo, for the mortgage broker's boss Angelo Mozilo. Friends of Angelo wrote mortgages "knocking a full point, or 1%, off a loan," CBS' Attkisson told us. "For now it is unclear whether there was anything illegal and whether Countrywide was able to fend off regulations by winning favor with the right people." Who were those "right people"? Attkisson named names, courtesy of Bob Feinberg, a onetime Countrywide executive: Sen Kent Conrad; Sen Christopher Dodd; former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros; Housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson; FannieMae CEO Franklin Raines; former FannieMae CEO James Johnson; and Clinton Jones, the chief counsel for the House Financial Services Committee. Attkisson did tell us that "Democrats are blocking a Republican effort to subpoena Countrywide documents" but she gets criticized by our fellow news monitor Brad Wilmouth at the conservative newsbusters.org for her failure to identify Dodd and Conrad as Democrats.
ABC's Golodryga listed nine firms from Cuomo's report--they are now eight since Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch--that paid out a total of $33bn in year-end bonuses in 2008 while collectively posting $82bn in losses. Besides BofA, the banks were Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, State Street and Bank of New York along with the investment banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Their response to the "bonus backlash" is not to pay executives less, she noted, but "simply shifting the bulk of compensation from annual bonuses to base salaries." By the way, Golodryga did not identify Cuomo as a Democrat.
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