Europeans back from summer vacation this week may be wishing they’d stayed on the beach. Stock markets in Germany, Italy, and France all dropped about 5% Monday, after the so-called “troika” of European institutions (the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and the European Central Bank) butted heads with the Greek government …
Lessons of the Crash: 4 Homeowner Trends We Hope Will Continue
While buyers take the bulk of the heat for ballooning up home prices at the peak of the market, homeowners were not entirely innocent, either. During the sub-prime era, the owner/seller-side bad behavior included fatal missteps …
Summer Blockbuster Bust: Fewest Movie Tickets Sold Since 1997
Americans just aren’t flocking to the movies like they used to. During the period from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day of 2011, theaters were projected to have sold 543 million movie tickets, the smallest figure since the …
I’m Unemployed and I Want to Start My Own Business
Dear TIME Moneyland,
I’ve always had a passion for animals. My first job was working at a local holistic pet food center, and I loved it. In college, I studied equine science because I thought I wanted to be a trainer. But I …
Warning to Income-Starved Investors: High Yield Means High Risk
Sometimes it pays to state the obvious: higher yield means higher risk. Here are some alternatives for income-starved retirees.
10 Steps For Choosing an Online Bank
A recent chart in American Banker magazine highlighted that free checking at larger banks is getting scarcer. As recently as 2009, 96 percent of banks with more than $50 billion in assets offered free checking; now, that number …
Are Political Suicides Needed to Save Greater Europe?
Greek tragedy strikes again. European and Greek leaders are at each other’s throats about Greece being on the dole. Again. And that’s got investors all in a tizzy about holding onto Greek debt. Again. So where does this leave the ominous eurozone crisis, which appears to have no end?
Here’s the gist of the problem. The “troika” in …
Banks Still Not Easing Credit Card Standards
On a day when the U.S. Labor Department says that the economy created zero jobs in the month of August, fresh data from the Federal Reserve suggests that one key component of U.S. gross domestic product growth — the vaunted …
New Mortgage Suits: U.S. Financial Problems Are Far from Fixed
UPDATE: 9/2/11, 10:15 PM
Remember the financial crisis. It’s back, sort of. This time the worry about the banks is being created not directly from bad loans, but from lawsuits that are now coming out of those now sour deals. And it appears a new round, and perhaps the biggest so far, could be coming came at the banks as soon as next …
Hit by Irene? Check for This Insurance Rider
Homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover floods. Flood insurance doesn’t cover basements. So what’s a homeowner to do?
Discover Discontinues Random-Number Security Feature
Discover Financial Services is discontinuing a security tool that allowed cardholders to request a randomly generated, one-time-use card number they could utilize for online or card-not-present transactions for which they …
To Kick Off the Labor Day Festivities, Some Grim Employment Statistics
Labor Day weekend is celebrated in honor of workers everywhere. Now, if only there were more companies willing to do the honorable thing and put more workers to work …