We all know that the market has had a rough few years, but new research from Bank of America Merrill Lynch suggests that stocks have been producing disappointing returns for much longer than that. Fifty years in fact. BofA-Merrill chief US equity strategist David Bianco found that when you adjust for inflation, taxes and trading costs …
There seems to be a growing consensus on Wall Street that Citigroup’s problems are behind it. The stock has been up recently, though at $4 the company’s shares have far from rebounded. Three years ago, Citigroup’s stock fetched $50. Nonetheless, Citigroup tried to fan those good feelings yesterday with some seemingly bullish comments …
Should accounting tricks be added to the long list of things that caused the financial crisis? I’m not sure. Turns out Lehman was even more leveraged than we thought. A report out on Thursday by a court appointed examiner into what went wrong at Lehman Brothers finds that the firm towards the end of its existence regularly employed …
I have a story up today on the website of our sister publication Fortune.com. It is part of Fortune’s excellent redesign issue. The story is focused on a study by Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard that finds a disturbing truth about financial planners:
Experts have long counseled against using financial planners who charge commissions,
…
There have been a lot of people blabbing on for the past few months about the new found thriftiness of the American consumer. The savings rate is up, and credit card balances are down. Well it appears, that that later piece of news does not fit as neatly into the thriftier American thesis as it appears. A new study by CardHub found that …
For a while now, chatter has been growing that the economy is headed for a double-dip recession. That’s the type where you think you have recovered, but in fact you are only on the first bump of the roller coaster. But this morning’s jobs numbers seem to suggest the possibility of a double dip is receeding. The Labor Department said the …
Goldman Sachs’ annual report is out today. Haven’t got a chance to read the whole thing yet. A reporter from one of my former employers digs through Goldman’s trading record. But here’s what caught my eye: I am now one of the biggest risks to the profits of Goldman Sachs–big enough to deserve mentioning for the first time in its annual …
The US Department of Commerce is out today with monthly numbers on personal earnings, spending and saving. The good news is that spending, up 5%, rose much faster than income, up 1%. The bad news is the same: Spending grew much faster than income.
Increases in spending, especially when they are rising much faster than income, show …
For a while there, it seemed the housing market had made the turn to recovery. Housing sales were up in nearly every month in 2009. But today it looks like real estate is headed back down again. The National Association of Realtors is out with its monthly housing stats and sales were down 7.2% in January from the month before, the second …
You might have read the news yesterday that Atlanta issued an arrest warrant for Jamie Dimon, the CEO of superbank JP Morgan Chase. The city wanted someone to clean up the thousands of tires that were piling up on a vacant property. Well, Obama’s favorite banker is free again to fly into Hartfield-Jackson and not be worried about …
Greetings from sometimes beautiful, but often rainy Vancouver! My name is Sean Gregory, and I’m a TIME staff writer on assignment covering the Winter Olympics. Though I’m not as curious about business and economics as the excellent gatekeepers of this blog (I’m a weirdo who tends to get stoked about the Nordic Combined event), …
Besides foreclosures, one of the lasting problems of the financial crisis is the fiscal trouble many states are in. The Journal has a good story today about Neveda’s budget squeeze. And over the weekend, a study from the National Governors Association found that state economies were likely to continue to worsen.
Just one sign of how bad …
