Ever since UBS agreed to hand over the names on thousands of undeclared offshore accounts, U.S. taxpayers (or non-taxpayers, as it were) have been rushing to the IRS to confess their sins. The deal: come clean of your own volition, and you’ll owe a significantly reduced penalty and you won’t have to go to jail.
That partial amnesty ends …
Well, we did it. Today we crossed Dow 10,000. Can Dow 36,000 be far behind?
I really can’t put it any better than the New York Post already has:
Bernie “The Bruiser” Madoff got into a prison-yard tussle with a fellow inmate over — of all things — the stock market, eyewitnesses told The Post.
And, by inmates’ accounts, the 71-year-old Ponzi schemer came out the winner.
I have a story up on Time.com about why I don’t think the $8,000 first-time home buyer tax credit should be extended. I was asked to write the story as an opinion piece, which is why it reads like an opinion piece—even though the headline might lead you to believe you’ll be getting some good old-fashioned …
I try not to spend too much time paying attention to politicians’ Twitter feeds (or to what politicians say in general… or to Twitter feeds), but this tweet, from Rep. Lee Terry of Nebraska caught my eye:
Why is an unemployed person in California more worthy of help than an unemployed person in Nebraska?
A loyal reader of the Curious Capitalist has asked me to post a story I wrote for Time.com. Since I’m here to serve:
Conventional wisdom says if you want to be richer, a useful thing to do is get married. Life is cheaper when there’s only one mortgage to pay and someone else can do certain tasks — cooking, say, or car repair — more
…
Yesterday the SEC rolled out a bunch of new rules and proposals meant to purge conflict of interest and ineptitude from the credit-ratings agencies—that group of companies whose greatest hits include considering Enron investment-grade until four days before it went bankrupt and, most recently, the “AAA-rated” CDO.
New numbers from the Federal Reserve show that American households* were $2 trillion richer at the end of June they were at the end of March. That’s a 4% jump over three months—and the first time household net worth has risen since the second quarter of 2007.
What accounts for the good fortune?
First American CoreLogic has taken a look at the effect of the government’s efforts to drive down mortgage interest rates, which, among other things, makes for easier refinancing. According to the loan analytics company, in the first half of 2009, refinancing homeowners set themselves up to save some $11.5 billion over the next five …
With the number of people going to collect unemployment checks on the rise—despite other good economic news—one starts to wonder, Could this be our third “jobless recovery” in a row?
Well, not in Canada. As this recent report (PDF) from CIBC World Markets points out, our northern neighbor isn’t having nearly the unemployment issues …
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) released its monthly tally of home sales this morning. The headline figure was pretty cheery. The number of existing homes sold in July increased 7.2% from June. Sales in July were also up 5% when compared to July 2008—the first year-over-year gain we’ve seen since November 2005. (The data …
Government jobs are more secure. No surprise there. But you might be surprised by just how much more secure they’ve been during this recession—which, as we were reminded this morning, trudges onward, at least in terms of the labor market.
A new report from the Rockefeller Institute finds that between December 2007 and July 2009, the …
