President Obama is availing himself of the bully pulpit again this week, with a speech in Phoenix on Tuesday and an online question-and-answer session hosted by real estate website Zillow, both of which focused on the real estate …
Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of e-commerce behemoth Amazon, has decided to use his personal fortune to purchase the Washington Post newspaper for $250 million. The news falls hard upon the announcement that another iconic American …
The Labor Department announced today that the U.S. economy added 162,000 jobs in June and that the unemployment rate fell two-tenths of a percentage point to 7.4%. The feds also said that job growth in April and May was slower …
New jobs like those found in Amazon fulfillment centers aren’t an antidote to the weak recovery; they are a symptom of it
Ever since the financial crisis, U.S. regulators have been hard at work putting away Wall Street financiers who play fast and loose with the law. The only problem is, those Wall Street crooks that the feds have been cracking down on aren’t those who actually caused the financial crisis, but a different breed of white collar criminal: …
With last year’s presidential election so focused on jobs and the economy, the American public probably knows more about the nuances of the unemployment rate than they ever have before. One particular of the official unemployment rate that received attention last year is that the Labor Department counts someone as unemployed only if he …
Among the small number of Americans who are passionate about financial regulation, no topic raises hackles more than the so-called Glass-Steagall act. It is “so-called” because when you hear the term “Glass-Steagall” the speaker is most certainly referring to four provisions from the Banking Act of 1933, which was sponsored by Senators
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Last year, electronics giant Best Buy delivered a series of disappointing earnings reports, sending investors to the exits and the company’s stock down to levels not seen in more than a decade. Many observers saw in all this the …
With the struggles in recent weeks over Obamacare implementation, immigration reform, and the debt ceiling, you would be forgiven for not noticing the fierce battle being fought in the United States Senate over an obscure federal agency called the National Labor Relations Board, which is tasked with enforcing federal labor law and …
As we near the three-year anniversary of President Obama signing the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill into law, the too-big-to-fail banks that percipitated the crisis are bigger and more powerful than ever. Though the new legislation does arm regulators with more powers that may prevent a large financial institution’s failure from …
The University of Michigan Consumer Confidence Index is one of the most trusted gauges of consumer sentiment, and its monthly release is followed closely by investors all over the globe.
Any single piece of information that …
There are few investments more divisive than gold. Unlike stocks or bonds, gold produces no dividends or interest payments, and unlike most other commodities, gold has few industrial uses. As a result, investing in gold requires …
