STOCKS SINK IN SEPTEMBER SELL-OFF (NY Post)

Ominous quote: ""September's usually a bad month, but this time it came much too early in just a single day."

Financials suffer amid profit concerns (FT)

Biggest fall since late June for big U.S. banks. Bank of America's talks with government to repay TARP money is not looked upon favorably. Ordinary bank customers beset by new or increasing fees might be amused, however, to learn that BofA is being told it will have to pay a $500 million fee to withdraw from the TARP arrangement.

Bomb Explodes Outside Athens Stock Exchange; One Hurt (Bloomberg)

A few months ago, the same radicals tried to blow up Citigroup's Greek offices, but the bomb fizzled.

News Corp. in Talks for Stake in Saudi Firm (WSJ)

Rupert Murdoch huddles with Prince Alwaleed to buy a 20 percent interest in Rotana Media, which already hosts Fox channels in Saudi Arabia. The prince's Kingdom Holding already holds a 5.7 percent stake in News Corp., so there's a strong business link.

The FTC's hammer comes down on robocalls (Salon, Andrew Leonard)

Good news: Telemarketers have to get your written permission before bombarding you with pre-recorded calls. Bad news: Not covered are calls from "politicians, banks, telephone carriers, and most charitable organizations," says the FTC. And there's nothing to stop debt collectors from dunning you with pre-recorded messages, as long as they're not trying to sell you anything.

After you: Consumers are paying for lenders' past excesses (Economist)

Banks are full of mortgages that make no money, so to compensate they're not doing new buyers any favors.

Redskins Fans Waited While Brokers Got Tickets (WashPost)

They used to call this scalping.

MORE HEADLINES FOLLOW

Under Pressure, Obama Defends Health-Care Plan (WSJ)

Teabaggers outside, friendly folks inside. Too friendly and too respectful inside, reminiscent of the carefully screened audiences at the "town halls" that Dick Cheney and George W. Bush conducted. Best quote from a teabagger outside: ""Adolf Hitler was for exterminating the weak, not just the Jews and stuff, and socialism — that's what's going to happen." "Jews and stuff" — sounds like a chain of Bar Mitzvah-themed gift shops.

G.M. Puts Electric Car's City Mileage in Triple Digits (NYT)

It took a fucking bankruptcy to make GM get on the stick and finally roll out a fucking electric car.

U.S. economy has bottomed: George Soros (Reuters)

He should know. He's one of the world's most aggressive, barebacking tops.

What a sweet racket: Take the money and run. Not as funny as Woody Allen's bank robbery, but much more efficient. Who's laughing? Not the taxpayers who bailed out the bankers because they supposedly couldn't rake in fresh equity.

The Financial Times (U.K.) does more than hint at this angle:

The bankers are acting so quickly to fling off the government's TARP that neither Capitol Hill nor the Obama crew have even had time to try to put in place new regulations on their activities. (See this ominous — for the banks — SEC proposal that's still only in the talking stage.)

And the bailout was so sweet that the bankers are paying us back dollar for dollar (supposedly). Which means that taxpayers aren't even getting a return on their investment of billions of dollars in Wall Street's banks. That's the way corporate welfare works, son.

The moneychangers are ecstatic, but future historians will also be happy, because this is more grist for the mill. If you want to investigate the causes of the Crash of '08, you could start with an examination of the wreckage caused by GMAC and the vultures who fed off it.

GMAC is the locus of a monumental melding of the two main meltdown dramas: the subprime-mortgage mess and the collapse of the U.S. auto industry. And throw in the Bernie Madoff scandal, too, because GMAC's chairman used to be Ezra Merkin, who faces fraud charges in that scam. Merkin only became GMAC's chairman after corporate raiders snatched it away from GM and put him in power.

There was a time not so long ago when GMAC was merely the fleet-financing arm for GM dealers, enabling them to keep their lots well-stocked with gas-guzzlers. As a really good Wall Street Journal story this morning on the disgraceful new bailout notes:

GMAC couldn't even qualify for a bailout if the Federal Reserve hadn't allowed it late last year to suddenly become a "bank," enabling it to seek TARP funds. Now GMAC is calling itself Ally Bank. An "ally" of what remains the question. A bank for the vultures is one answer that quickly comes to mind.

As the WSJ also notes, and way up high too, it's a controversial move by the banks, because they're under fire for charging higher fees to consumers for a slew of products. Including, as I put it Monday, "jacking up fees" for mortgages.

But the banks need that extra moolah from fees because they've spent record amounts on lobbying in the past three years.

For some more background on Wall Street's lobbying, see "Wall Street's investment in pols paid off," in which I pointed on March 4 to a report whose information is sound, though its title is somewhat hysterical: "Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America."

On the other hand, the banking industry is displaying quite a bit of gall. The WSJ points out that the American Bankers Association is begging Treasury to let banks withdraw from TARP's Capital Purchase Program without having to pay "an onerous exit fee." (See the ABA's own reference to this on April 17.)

Reiteration: The banks themselves have already furtively hiked fees on the public and initiated new ones. Further gall: These fees on the public are being jacked up amid the drumbeat of propaganda that average Americans need to give banks and other companies more money to help "spend" our way out of the recession.