Credit Card Report
Financial News Made Easy

What started as a fairly simple three-page proposal giving the Treasury Secretary unchecked power to orchestrate a bailout of the country’s financial system ended up as a complex rescue package, with enhanced congressional oversight, some added protections for taxpayers and a slap on the wrist to highly paid, underperforming executives.

In the short run, congressional leaders have achieved their goal of producing an agreement Sunday on a federal bailout of banks and other financial institutions holding bad mortgage debts before the world’s stock markets reopened.

On Sept. 7, 2006, Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, stood before an audience of economists at the International Monetary Fund and announced that a crisis was brewing.

The audience seemed skeptical, even dismissive.

That was then. This is now.

Cutting back on your credit card spending habits is easy — and beneficial, whether in times of economic stress or abundance.

How is it that a mess concentrated in one part of the mortgage business — subprime loans — has frozen the credit markets, sent stock markets gyrating, caused the collapse of Bear Stearns, left the economy on the brink of the worst recession in a generation and forced the Federal Reserve to take its boldest action since the Depression?