As the Move Your Money movement preaches, there’s good reason for shifting your savings and checking accounts to local banks and credit unions. There’s just as much reason to change the kind of plastic you use.
Phrase of the Day: “Checking Account Chicken”
You “win” when stores OK your debit card purchases even though there’s not enough money in your account to cover the bill. And as a post-game bonus, you get a trophy filled with overdraft fees.
Housing Recovery Stalls
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 …
It’s a Deal: 20% Off at Shoes.com
Greece Gets Snowed Under by New York
It’s a snow day here in New York City, with a foot and a half of the white stuff muffling the traffic noise and frosting the trees in my uptown neighborhood. Downtown on Wall Street there’s snow too, but a slightly different story: Greece is being buried by traders. They have been betting big money that the Aegean nation, familiar to …
GDP goes up, stocks go down
This morning the Commerce Department released revised figures for fourth quarter GDP. There was good news: economic output increased at a 5.9% seasonally adjusted annualized pace, up from an earlier measure of 5.7%, showing that the economy is buzzing along even faster than we thought.
Stock futures promptly dropped. Wait. What?
Online User Reviews: Use Them to Buy Wisely, Vent, and Get Free Stuff
User reviews on sites like Yelp, CitySearch, and Amazon have changed the way consumers decide what to buy, what to read, where to eat, where to get their hair done, and so on. Before trying a place or product out, you can read about the experiences of dozens, sometimes hundreds of other consumers. While the information doesn’t always …
Will China Dump U.S. Debt?
One of the big worries Americans have about China’s rising economic power concerns its immense holdings of U.S. government debt. The fear is that Chinese actions regarding these holdings could end up destabilizing the U.S. economy, or that they could be used as a political tool to influence American policy. If China, let’s say, got …
Credit where credit is due
Federal Reserve governor Elizabeth Duke is due to give a really nice piece of testimony tomorrow unpacking what’s going on with small-businesses lending. Judging by the advance text up on the Fed’s web site, it will be a joyously nuanced picture. Banks are hesitant to lend, yes, and are sometimes hamstrung by their own imprudent lending …
Jamie Dimon, Free at Last
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 …
How a $400 Phone Costs Less than a $150 Phone
Paying more upfront can be a long-term money saver.
The Cobbler’s Child
The scion of a shoemaking family takes a step in a different direction with Terra Plana