Bad Credit Loans

• Thain was criticised over expensive office refurbishment • Role as head of the troubled US lender could net him $6m The former Merrill Lynch boss John Thain, who was ousted a year ago amid a furore over lavish office expenditure, has won a chance to rehabilitate his career by landing a $6m-a-year (£3.8m) job as [...]

• Thain was criticised over bonuses and expensive office refurbishment • New role as head of CIT, troubled US lender, could net him $5.5m in shares John Thain, the former boss of Merrill Lynch, returned to the business world today when he was named as chief executive of troubled US commercial lender CIT Group. The company announced [...]

• $182bn AIG bailout a tragic choice, says Timothy Geithner • Congress furious at Geithner for repaying AIG’s bank loans The US treasury secretary Timothy Geithner was accused of incompetence, obfuscation and of making “lame excuses” during a furious hearing on Capitol Hill over the government’s contentious bailout of the sprawling insurer AIG. In an unusually [...]

Investment bank under fire again as investors protest at record bonuses of $717,000 each Goldman Sachs has had to defend itself from angry taxpayers, regulators, the government – and now its own shareholders. Some of the US investment bank’s largest investors are furious about the New York-based firm paying record bonuses to its staff – bonuses are [...]

The US government executed an emergency bailout of troubled AIG without sufficient planning, botching its initial $85bn (£50bn) effort to rescue the ailing business and further weakening the multinational insurer’s financial position, according to a critical official report into last year’s near collapse of the company. An inspector charged with overseeing the treasury’s bail-out efforts concludes [...]

A new ethnographic study by Karen Ho reveals the inner life of American bankers Anthropologists used to study the alien: pygmies in rainforests with blowdarts and more piercings than a knife-thrower’s assistant. Nowadays, however, few societies are more foreign than that found on Wall Street. After all, what could be more outlandish than the tribes of [...]

• Credit card losses to blame for poor performance• Finance arm of General Electric profits dip 42% America’s biggest bank issued a warning shot over the state of the world economy today when it revealed a quarterly loss of $1bn (£612m) on the back of large credit card losses. The poor results in Bank of America’s consumer [...]

• US pay tsar rules Ken Lewis will receive no pay this year• Citigroup, General Motors and Chrysler also under scrutiny Outgoing Bank of America chief executive Ken Lewis will get no pay this year, the US government’s pay tsar has ruled. Kenneth Feinberg, the US treasury department official who is scrutinising pay packages at bailed-out banks, [...]

• Net profits of $3.6bn in third quarter• Staff on course for average pay of $133,000 JP Morgan Chase signalled today that City firms are preparing to make huge bonus payments after it kicked off the US bank reporting season by smashing profit expectations. The bank revealed it had set aside $7.3bn (£4.6bn) in the third quarter [...]

Neil Barofsky, the inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program has criticised US Treasury officials for making optimistic statements last September, at the height of the financial crisis The US Treasury misled the public over the health of struggling Wall Street banks receiving emergency funds at the height of the financial crisis, creating unrealistic expectations [...]