Apparently, the stock market took a little tumble last week while I was away on vacation. Now that I’m back, things are looking so much more cheery. Here we are, at 4 p.m., and the Dow, S&P and Nasdaq are all up by more than 3%. I’ve been asked to write a blog post about [...]
As the Senate continues debating financial-industry reform this week, I’d like to re-iterate a point I first made in a Time.com article: lots of businessmen are in favor of a sweeping overhaul. You wouldn’t necessarily know that from reading the headlines, since headlines tend to capture the highest profile lobbying—like what comes from the U.S. Chamber [...]
So I arrived in London this morning, to help out my colleagues with the escalating Europe debt crisis story, only to find out that in the mere 12 hours I was on a plane, not only has the entire face of the crisis changed, the entire continent has changed. After Europe’s leaders did everything they [...]
What do we make of a market that ignores good news? That’s what the Dow appeared to do Friday. After starting the day on a positive note, the April jobs report showing that payrolls grew by 290,000, the market turned negative within an hour and spent most of the day in the red. For the [...]
—Is this the number we have been waiting for? The economy added 290,000 jobs in April. That was better than expected. Yes, the unemployment number went up. But that is to be expected as well. As more employers hire, more people come back into the workforce. Still at 9.9% jobless, we have a long way [...]
One month of jobs numbers tells us very little about the economy’s direction. But with the April jobs numbers released Friday morning we have back to back months of powerful gains. The Labor Department reports that April job growth was 290,000. The original number for the month of March had been 162,000 jobs gained; it [...]
You probably know the bad news already. Stocks on Thursday dropped 600 points in 15 minutes in mid-afternoon. The market went down nearly 1000 points before rebounding. That’s the worst mid-day drop in the Dow Jones industrial average EVER. So really bad stuff. But here’s the good news: Bond prices were up. During the hysteria, [...]
The stock market sent shock waves through the world economy on Wednesday, falling nearly 1000 points in the early afternoon in a spastic move that was partly reversed within an hour or so of the initial drop. Most startling, seven hundred points of the drop happened in just 15 minutes, leading many to conclude that [...]
—The Senate moved closer to passing a financial reform bill. Dodd is playing down the fact that regulators will lose the ability to create a $50 billion fund to pay for future bailouts. But to me that seems like a big deal. Yes, the government still has the ability to make banks pay for the [...]
There’s updated data on the cost to taxpayers of the Homebuyer Tax Credit, which expired at the end of April. The U.S. Treasury reports that through March 27 some 2.2 million people had filed for the credit and the cost to the Treasury was nearly $16 billion. That’s up from 1.8 million filers through late [...]
