The new homes market is looking more and more barren (Photo: Chris Keane/REUTERS)
It might be time to bring back the home buyer tax credit.
On Wednesday, a day after the National Association of Realtors said sales of existing homes dropped 2.2% in October, the Census Bureau said that new home sales had dropped a full 80% below their …
Bernanke critics are on the attack (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
What is the most likely cause of civil unrest today? Immigration. Gay marriage. Abortion. The results of Election Day. The mosque at Ground Zero. Nope.
Try the Federal Reserve. Nov. 3 is when the Federal Reserve’s next policy committee meeting ends, and if you thought this …
World markets are practically giddy in their expectation for a new round of easing by the US Federal Reserve. As the Financial Times noted Thursday morning, “the FTSE All-World index is up 0.8 percent to its best level since September 2008. The benchmark has climbed 14% in six weeks–a period in which traders’ risk appetite has risen …
Peter Diamond, co-winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Economics, is congratulated by colleagues. (Brian Snyder/REUTERS)
Why doesn’t the unemployment rate ever reach zero? Economists, who generally believe that supply tends to meet demand, long pondered this question. Even in good times, i.e. not now, there are people who can’t find …
Cell phone tower builders could get a stimulus benefit
If you think a plan called, “Cash for Cell Phone Towers,” or “Cash for Internal Combustion Engines,” sounds kind of clunky, that may be the problem.
On Wednesday, President Obama in a speech in Cleveland, Ohio, officially announces a bonanza of a business tax cut that could …
More people are lining up for jobs via Reuters
The Department of Labor reported August job numbers on Friday, and the numbers appeared to be another bad sign for the recovery. The economy lost 54,000 positions in the last full month of summer. Worse, the unemployment rate rose for the first time in four months to 9.6%, from a rate of …
Bernanke made a speech this morning to other central bankers, economists and journalists at an annual forum in Jackson Hole. There were a number of key phrases Fed watchers were expecting to hear and, hopefully, not hear. And here’s the tally. Bernanke used some variation of the work “slow” seven times. So, as expected, Bernanke was …
What should be the top tax rate for America’s wealthiest citizens? I recently wrote a post arguing why we should think about raising tax rates for the super wealthy. This evoked a range of responses from commenters. tnnumbers wrote:
As others have mentioned, the wealthy no longer limit their investments to America, so even taking into
…
No more need to wait for the double dip in housing. It appears to be here. Earlier today, the National Association of Realtors announced housing market figures for July and the numbers were not nice indeed. Sales of existing homes fell 27% in July from the month before. July was the slowest pace for single family house sales since May of …
You would expect a very basic rule of the stock market to be that earnings are good. Yet this morning after two of the biggest banks in the nation Citigroup and Bank of America reported nearly $6 billion in earnings, not only did the shares of those two companies drop, but so did the whole market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was …
For a time now my editor Rick Stengel has been asking the question: Why won’t unemployment stay at around 10%. That is to say, even after the economy pulls out of the recession how do we know that unemployment won’t remain where it is today. Perhaps 10% is the new 5%, when it comes to unemployment. We have afterall outsourced many of our …
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 …
