There’s a lot of talk about what Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest for sexually assaulting a maid means for the eurozone crisis. Less attention has gone to the fate of another project close to DSK’s heart: weaning the global financial system off of the U.S. dollar. DSK had been a vocal proponent of using the IMF’s de-facto currency, the …
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Curious CapitalistEconomy & Policy
The S & P Goes Bearish On the U.S.
Is this the first domino in the next global financial crisis? It’s possible. Today the S & P revised its long-term credit rating outlook for the U.S. from “stable” to “negative.” The immediate result has been a flight from risky assets and anything linked to optimistic views on global growth – gold and Treasuries are up, …
Are We Spending Too Much?
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Americans are, once again, no longer letting their meager incomes get in the way of a good trip to the mall. Consumer spending rose 0.7% in the last month of 2010. That was not only a bigger than expected jump in spending, but it was more than double the 0.3% rise in the month before. But here’s the problem: The income of …
The case against tax expenditures
There are two obvious ways to reduce the federal deficit (spend less or tax more), and then there’s the really compelling one—stop using the tax code to guide the way people make decisions. Bloomberg recently reported that the President’s debt commission is focusing “a lot” on tax expenditures—the deductions, exemptions and other tax …
Are the Banks’ Credit Card Portfolios Really Improving?
Rising home foreclosures was of course the main catalyst of the financial crisis. But credit card debt was also a big problem for the banks as more people lost their jobs and were unable to pay back all the boats and xboxes they had rung up on plastic. So the news a month or so ago that credit card delinquency rates were falling was …
Your debt is forgiven, but your taxes are not
Here’s a bit of unhappy news for tax season. The folks over at LowCards.com point out that even if your credit card company has forgiven the debt you owe them, there’s still a good chance you have to pay tax on the amount. That caveat is going to catch a lot of people this year since, as Steve mentioned a few weeks ago, card companies …