If you’re watching recent developments in Europe with an uneasy feeling of déjà vu, you have good reason. It was almost exactly a year ago that the European Union stepped in with a 110 billion euro ($158 billion) bailout for debt-plagued Greece. Yet here we are, a year later, and Greece’s debt is again the [...]
A million years ago, Microsoft was a late arrival to this thing called the Internet. And it seems that the company has never ceased trying to play catch up in the various business segments the web has spawned. Search, games, email, commerce, news, advertising, social networks—you name it and the warriors of Redmond have been [...]
There’s more bad news out about housing today. The prices of homes fell in more than 75% of U.S. cities in the first quarter, according to the National Association of Realtors. The data is stoking a new wave of bearishness on when the housing market will bottom. But as Stephen Gandel points out in yesterday’s [...]
Gas prices still haven’t reached the ominous $4 a gallon expected in the weekly gas price report out yesterday. In fact, the painful rise in gas prices seems to be slowing (from $3.963 last week to $3.965 today). But if gas prices do start to drop, don’t get too comfortable. As noted in last week’s [...]
The news today is that the value of your most valuable asset is in trouble again. A report from website Zillow, which lets you look up what your house is worth, says that home prices in the US fell 3% in the first quarter. Worse, Zillow says housing prices could fall as much as 9% [...]
Where were you the day the market dropped nearly 700 points in 20 minutes? Don’t remember. You’re not alone. May 6th was the one-year anniversary of the so-called Flash Crash. It came and went without much fanfare. But on the day of the event a year ago and for a few months after, it seemed [...]
Are wealthy Americans paying more than their fare share of income taxes? That’s a much harder question to answer than Washington might have you think. Republican lawmakers touted a statistic by the Join Committee on Taxation last week that found 51% of households owed no federal income tax in 2009, a number they’re using to [...]
Is it time to stop worrying about the recovery? In April, the economy added 244,000 jobs. That was more than double the 93,000 workers companies boosted their payrolls by just six months ago, and it was far more than expected. After a string of weak economic data, and drop in the price of oil yesterday, [...]
The price of oil plunged today, down more than $9 to $99.60. But the largest one-day drop in oil prices since the height of the financial crisis is unlikely to stop talk that high gas prices could kill the recovery. According to the oil price spike of 2008, whenever gas prices hit $4 a gallon, [...]
Wall Street may soon have to finally pay for its folly. Earlier this week, the US Attorneys office of the Department of Justice sued Deutsche Bank for allegedly tricking a government insurance program into backing mortgage loans that were much riskier than they were portrayed. Many of those loans have defaulted causing nearly $400 million [...]
