Get ready for monetary easing 3.0. That was the takeaway from Fed chair Ben Bernanke’s speech in Minneapolis today. Bernanke didn’t indicate what form easing might take. But any of the options on offer are bound to tick off countries like Brazil and Switzerland, which are struggling to hold down the values of their currencies [...]
Long before the banks started evicting delinquent homeowners, Wall Street, it appears, used robo-signers to ink mortgage deals that would eventually cost investors tens of billions of dollars and in part led to the financial crisis. According to lawsuits filed last week by the U.S.’s Federal Housing Financing Agency, one individual was used by three different banks [...]
It’s been about two weeks since the Obama administration floated the idea of a massive mortgage refinance, and there seems to be little consensus on whether the plan would provide a boost to either the economy or the housing market. The plan is to allow the millions of homeowners who have government owned mortgages to [...]
Europeans back from summer vacation this week may be wishing they’d stayed on the beach. Stock markets in Germany, Italy, and France all dropped about 5% Monday, after the so-called “troika” of European institutions (the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and the European Central Bank) butted heads with the Greek government over its budget [...]
Greek tragedy strikes again. European and Greek leaders are at each other’s throats about Greece being on the dole. Again. And that’s got investors all in a tizzy about holding onto Greek debt. Again. So where does this leave the ominous eurozone crisis, which appears to have no end? Here’s the gist of the problem. [...]
UPDATE: 9/2/11, 10:15 PM Remember the financial crisis. It’s back, sort of. This time the worry about the banks is being created not directly from bad loans, but from lawsuits that are now coming out of those now sour deals. And it appears a new round, and perhaps the biggest so far, could be coming [...]
Zippo. Nadda. Goose egg. The big fat one. That’s how many jobs the economy added in August. And that is really bad news. Perhaps we should have known that this summer – with the near government default, the European debt crisis, the U.S. credit downgrade, and Hurricane Irene – was bad for the economy. But [...]
In a new report by the Institute for Policy Studies, 25 of the 100 highest paid CEOs earned more last year than their companies paid in taxes. Not surprisingly, the report has gotten a lot of traction in the media; the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Reuters snatched it up. But more interestingly, [...]
Call it turnover Thursday. In the past 48 hours, chief executives of three of the U.S.’s largest companies – Bank of New York Mellon, Costco and Bank of New York Mellon – have either called it quits or been shown the door. Perhaps they wanted to make labor day truly a long weekend. Of the [...]
The media advisory advised that U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas J. Donohue would be offering ideas to immediately create jobs and spur the economy. And that the Chamber will be bringing these ideas to Congress and the President this month. Excellent, we’re all for jobs. And what ideas might those be? The usual suspects: [...]
