|
|
Best Buy released its first-quarter 2012 earnings this week, and though the numbers beat Wall Street expectations, net income took a tumble — falling 25%, compared with last year. And more than just poor earnings have plagued the nation’s largest retailer of late. Six weeks ago, former CEO Brian Dunn left the company amid allegations [...]
The global economy is straining under the weight of more than just public sector debt. In the developed world, consumers, financial institutions, and other corporations have each accumulated unprecedented levels of debt — and how that total debt is managed will ultimately determine the economic fate of the global economy going forward.
There is a small chorus of voices that is blaming neither government inaction nor banker recklessness for JPMorgan’s loss, but the policies of the Federal Reserve. These critics are arguing that excessive intervention by the central bank has distorted financial markets and forced big banks resort to risky moves in order to maintain profits.
A new, fifty-page analysis from The Demand Institute suggests that home prices will begin to rise later this year.
One of the great thorns in the side of the American public is that the too-big-to-fail banks that were the cause of the financial crisis are still around today. They are employing many of the same people and paying dividends to many of the same shareholders. And there has been no retribution for the havoc [...]
Americans love economic mobility. It’s kind of a founding myth for us: We see ourselves as having broken free from rigid, aristocratic Europe to form a meritocracy that guaranteed a chance to move up in the world. Though there has been much talk lately about rising income inequality in the United States, what has worried [...]
Updated at 1:30 p.m. There’s a sizable portion of the American public that’s against bailing out underwater American homeowners under any circumstances. That sentiment was most eloquently summed up by CNBC’s Rick Santelli in 2009. His fiery speech on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade is credited with spurring the Tea Party movement [...]
Any way you cut it, the Labor Department’s announcement that the U.S. economy added just 115,000 jobs in April is a disappointment. Economists had been expecting 160,000 new jobs, and even that number is far below the kind of growth our economy needs to get back to full strength in the near term. At the [...]
Chief Executive Magazine has released its annual list of best and worse states to do business, and Southern and Mountain-West states dominated the rankings to the detriment of the two coasts. The top five states in the survey, Texas; Florida; North Carolina; Tennessee and Indiana, are praised by the magazine for their governments’ low-tax and lax-regulatory policies.
Many have been eager for home prices nationally to reach a point at which they stabilize and start to creep back up, but the information superhighway is littered with the corpses of pundits who have erroneously called the “bottom” of the real estate market. Hope springs eternal, however, and this week produced two reports which have analysts optimistic that we’re out of the woods when i comes to housing.
