Peanut Butter News

Full Story at msnbc.com

Why use our money to give bonuses. Get the banks back on their feet first. America is the only place that lets these places have a vacation with our money instead of first fixing the problem. We as citizens can’t do that. They would put us in jail for miss using the money we would get. These people just don’t care as long as their live stile does not change.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s pay czar said Friday that 17 banks receiving taxpayer money from the $700 billion financial bailout made “ill-advised” payments to their executives. But he stopped short of calling them “contrary to the public interest,” language that would have signaled a fight to get it back.

Kenneth Feinberg also said he did not try to recoup $1.6 billion in lavish compensation to top executives at the bailed-out banks because he wanted to protect the banks from possible lawsuits from shareholders trying to recapture the executives’ money.

Full Story at msnbc.com

CASA GRANDE, Ariz. – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac took over a foreclosed home roughly every 90 seconds during the first three months of the year. They owned 163,828 houses at the end of March, a virtual city with more houses than Seattle. The mortgage finance companies, created by Congress to help Americans buy homes, have become two of the nation’s largest landlords.

Bill Bridwell, a real estate agent in the desert south of Phoenix, is among the thousands of agents hired nationwide by the companies to sell those foreclosures, recouping some of the money that borrowers failed to repay.

Full Story at ABCNews.go.com

Appearing on “Good Morning America” today Feinberg also responded to a senior Republican congressman who claimed that AIG has “taxpayers over a barrel.”

In a statement released Tuesday night Sen. Charles Grassley, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee said “the Obama administration has been outmaneuvered. And the closed-door negotiations just add to the skepticism that the taxpayers will ever get the upper hand.”

Feinberg insisted he had not been “outmaneuvered” by the insurance giant.

Full Story at CNN.com

(CNN) — The past 12 months have been a banner year for cyber crime. And that could be bad news for the future of e-commerce.

“At current trends, in three or four years people will start to think twice about transacting on the Web, individuals and businesses,” said Michael Fraser, director of the communications law centre at the University of Technology Sydney.

“The way it’s trending now, the Web could be so full of rubbish that people won’t trust it,” Fraser said. “That could destroy the potential of the whole knowledge economy, which so many developed economies are counting on for the competitive advantage.”

Full Story At CNBC.com

The Treasury Department put pressure on Citi not to take delivery of a new aircraft, CNBC has learned. Sources say a call Monday night from someone in the department to the bank, expressed “disappointment” in Citi’s originial decision to take delivery. The call was said not to be from new Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

Citigroup released a statement saying it has no intention of taking delivery of any new aircraft, a company spokesman told CNBC a day after its plans to take delivery of a new plane sparked criticism.