Everyone from the Government Accountability Office to the Postmaster General has argued that the Postal Service may need to cut six-day mail delivery back to five. The move would save the Postal Service some $2 billion to $3 billion a year. That’s a big deal for an organization that is saying it might be insolvent [...]
Today is Tax Day, so cue the inevitable griping. One story making the rounds is that nearly half of all America’s don’t pay taxes. This is silly stuff. The magazine I used to work for MONEY examined the suppossed free-tax rider issue nearly two years ago and found this: Yes, there are 50 million people [...]
–Stuart Schweitzer, a JP Morgan strategist, was in earlier in the week making the case that the recovery could be better than expected because of the recent quick dip in new jobless claims, effectively dubbing this the jobless-less recovery. Well that argument seems a little compelling this morning. The government is out with new data [...]
China’s gross domestic product grew a spectacular 11.9% in the first quarter of 2010, compared to the same period a year before. Qu Hongbin, an economist with HSBC, figures that China’s GDP is expanding at an annualized rate of nearly 11%. That’s darn fast. Perhaps too fast. Reports from economists about the Q1 figures featured [...]
It’s a tough nut to crack: how should the U.S. reconfigure its housing finance system, including lumbering giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, in the wake of the greatest housing-finance meltdown since the Great Depression? In fact, it’s so difficult a question to answer that the Obama Administration is turning for advice to… well, you.
Jason Zweig, my former office neighbor at MONEY and one of the best journalists I have ever worked with, uncovered a great tidbit about one of the major players in Washington’s financial reform debate: Republican Congressman Spencer Bachus is actually the E-Trade Baby, or at the very least a close relative. Bachus? E-Trade Baby? Besides the striking resemblance here’s what [...]
–There has been a lot of talk about how banks can’t repeat last year’s trading infused earnings gains. JP Morgan proves them wrong this morning, reporting that it earned $3.3 billion in the first quarter, up an amazing 55% from a year ago. Bank earnings season continues on Friday with Bank of America.
There was a nice moment in today’s House hearing on reasons lenders aren’t more readily reducing principal as a part of loan modifications (despite evidence that principal reduction has the most shot of keeping homeowners current on their mortgage payments). CitiMortgage CEO Sanjiv Das basically thanked the government for inserting itself into the debate. “The government’s [...]
The ongoing fiscal meltdown in Greece has become something like watching a really bad action flick. The required damsel-in-distress (in this case named Greece), yelping and screaming from scene to scene, barely survives repetitive attempts to do her in by assorted bad guys (in this case called speculators), until some hunk with a lot of [...]
Well, it happened. The Dow Jones finally closed above 11,000 a level it has not seen since the Fall of 2008. There weren’t much in the way fireworks to go along with the occasion and that could be because the rise was rather wimpy. The market closed with the Dow just 5.97 points above 11,000, [...]
