— Governors of five states urged the federal government to provide $1 trillion in aid to the country's 50 states to help pay for education, welfare and infrastructure, as states struggle with steep budget deficits amid a deepening recession.

— Treasuries recorded their biggest annual gain since 1995 as falling stocks and frozen credit markets drove investors to the relative safety of U.S. government debt. Yields of all maturities touched record lows as financial firms’ losses in the credit crisis exceeded $1 trillion and policy makers made unprecedented moves to ...

— Pete Sepp, vice president of the National Taxpayers Union, said the polar bear exhibit and many of the other proposals in the report are just plain pork. "To the people supporting them, these proposals aren't a joke, but to the taxpayers funding them, yes -- this will be a joke ...

— The Federal Reserve refused a request by Bloomberg News to disclose the recipients of more than $2 trillion of emergency loans from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral. Bloomberg filed suit Nov. 7 under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act requesting details about the ...

— The Treasury sold $27 billion of three-month bills yesterday at a discount rate of 0.005 percent, the lowest since it starting auctioning the securities in 1929. The U.S. also sold $30 billion of four-week bills today at zero percent for the first time since it began selling the debt in ...

— The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $2.8 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the only plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset ...

— "The announced nationalization-expropriation of the Argentine pension funds constitutes one of the most blatant acts of financial piracy in the country's recent history," wrote Claudio Loser, senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue, in the Latin American Advisor newsletter. "The proposed expropriation would eliminate individual savings, and convert them into a ...

— In the end, what fiscal conservatives wanted didn't turn out to matter much. As the Wall Street vapors scrambled every aspect of the 2008 presidential campaign and of George W. Bush's final days in office, no one was as angry as D.C.'s dwindling number of libertarians.

— In response to concerns expressed by some that allowing even one of the big automakers to fail would be too much of an economic hit for the nation, Inhofe said reality must be accepted. "If we keep on nursing a broken system, then we can't expect to have a different ...

— Mr. Paulson conceded that he had scrapped the plan he originally sold to Congress in September, which was to have the Treasury Department buy hundreds of billions of dollars worth of illiquid mortgage-backed securities in order to free up banks to resume normal lending.

— Yet for all this activity, no formal action has been taken to fill the independent oversight posts established by Congress when it approved the bailout to prevent corruption and government waste. Nor has the first monitoring report required by lawmakers been completed, though the initial deadline has passed.

— David Hendler, an analyst at CreditSights, says it looks as if government is left holding the bag, and of course that translates into everyone. "The losses have to be taken, but no one wants to take them," Hendler said at a conference Wednesday, speaking about the banks and their handling ...

— Of the initial $350 billion that Congress freed up, out of the $700 billion in bailout money contained in the law that passed last month, the Treasury Department has committed all but $60 billion. The shrinking pie — and the growing uncertainty over who qualifies — has thrown Washington's legal ...

— Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. Two months later, as the Fed lends far more than that in separate rescue programs that didn't require approval by ...

— If the banks, which frequently lent irresponsibly, and many homeowners, who often borrowed irresponsibly, are getting government assistance, Mr. Lawrence says he believes sober souls like himself are also due a break. “Why am I being punished for having bought a house I could afford?” he asked. “I am beginning ...