One of the nagging questions I have had about the Occupy Wall Street movement is why now. Income inequality is nothing new. And while it appears that the recession has been worse on the unemployed and the working poor than the rich, recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that for the first time [...]
Talk about drama. Before Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou on Thursday backed away from plans to hold a controversial referendum on the bailout for Greece, he, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy emerged from an emergency meeting on Wednesday with a bombshell: Greece will have to decide if it wants to remain in [...]
The good news is that the Federal Reserve thinks the economy is improving. The bad news is the Fed says GDP and employment won’t improve as much as it earlier thought. According to a statement released by the Fed today, Ben Bernanke & Co. said that in the past month the economy has gotten stronger. [...]
We still don’t know what to do for sure with the Too Big to Fail. That was the conclusion of a star-studded (well in wonky financial circles anyway) mock, bank-resolution panel in which Larry Summers – a former U.S. Treasury Secretary – played a future Treasury Secretary having to deal with a Lehman Brothers-like collapse. [...]
There doesn’t have to be a full-blown financial crisis for there to be dead bodies, so to speak, on Wall Street. There’s been increasing speculation over the past few weeks about whether the European debt problems would cause financial problems for a U.S. bank. Most of the concerns focused not on the debt of the [...]
