By Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein: As ProPublica has been detailing for two years, Wall Street banks and the hedge fund Magnetar worked together to build mortgage-backed deals that the hedge fund also bet against. The more than $40 billion of deals helped fuel the crash of ...read more
by Charles Ornstein: For many people without insurance, a key question raised by the Supreme Court's decision today to uphold the Affordable Care Act is whether states will decline to participate in the law's big Medicaid expansion. Although the court upheld the law's mandate ...read more
By Suevon Lee: The growth of the private detention industry has long been a subject of scrutiny. A recent eight-part series in the New Orleans Times-Picayune chronicled how more than half of Louisiana's 40,000 inmates are housed in prisons run by sheriffs or private companies ...read more
by Marian Wang: A few months after he buried his son, Francisco Reynoso began getting notices in the mail. Then the debt collectors came calling. "They would say, 'We don't care what happened with your son, you have to pay us,'" recalled Reynoso, a gardener from Palmdale, ...read more
by Lois Beckett: Microsoft and Yahoo are selling political campaigns the ability to target voters online with tailored ads using names, Zip codes and other registration information that users provide when they sign up for free email and other services. The Web giants provide ...read more
By Justin Elliott: The opponents of a new rule to post political ad information online have opened up another front in a long-running fight, inserting language into an appropriations bill that would bar the Federal Communications Commission from implementing the transparency ...read more
By Paul Kiel and Cora Currier: States have diverted $974 million from this year's landmark mortgage settlement to pay down budget deficits or fund programs unrelated to the foreclosure crisis, according to a ProPublica analysis. That's nearly forty percent of the $2.5 billion ...read more
By Megha Rajagopalan: Last week, the Department of Homeland Security revealed a rash of cyber attacks on natural gas pipeline companies. Just as with previous cyber attacks on infrastructure, there was no known physical damage. But security experts worry it may only be a ...read more
by Megan Murphy and Vanessa Houlder, Financial Times, and Jeff Gerth In November 2001, Bank of New York, a mid-tier U.S. bank, transferred nearly $8 billion of its own assets to a trust in the small, business-friendly state of Delaware through several layers of newly created ...read more
By Kim Barker: He may be in last place when it comes to delegates, but when it comes to filing expense reports with the FEC, Ron Paul beats everyone. His campaign's hyper-vigilance is notable, verging on fanatical. Every bank fee, every 22 cents at a FedEx, every $1 toll on ...read more
By Jesse Eisinger and Chris Arnold: New analyses by mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have added an explosive new dimension to one of the most politically charged debates about the housing crisis: Whether to reduce the amount of money beleaguered homeowners owe on ...read more
by Lena Groeger: The aftermath of last week's killing of 16 Afghans has prompted a flurry of speculation into the mind of 38-year old U.S. combat staff sergeant Robert Bales. In particular, the injuries to it. Traumatic brain injuries are so common among today's troops that ...read more
By Abrahm Lustgarten: BP's refining subsidiary was released today from criminal probation related to a 2005 explosion in Texas City that killed 15 workers. The company has addressed the most serious safety deficiencies exposed by the accident and satisfied the terms of a felony ...read more
