A prize to the first person who guesses correctly:
(Hint: It’s one of the reasons we think we need a $700 billion bailout plan.)
Thanks to Bill Saporito, author of this article, for passing along the ad.
Barbara!
Reuters reports:
The U.S Mint said Thursday it was temporarily suspending sales of American Buffalo 24-karat gold one-ounce bullion coins because strong demand depleted its inventory…
Coin dealers from the United States to Canada have recently reported a surge in buying of bullion coins and other gold products as troubles in the
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Yesterday we talked about existing-home sales. Today, some grim figures from the Commerce Department about new construction: new home sales fell by 11.5% in August to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 460,000, the slowest pace since January 1991. What’s particularly worrisome is that after dropping slightly last month, inventory is …
Today it’s the House’s turn to ask Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke questions about the $700 billion bailout plan. The House is usually more populist than the Senate, but I imagine today will be especially lively, considering that everyone is up for re-election in six weeks. Congressmen will start making their statements at noon, but we’ll …
Home sales are down, after an uptick in July. From the National Association of Realtors:
Nationally, existing-home sales–including single-family, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops–declined 2.2 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.91 million units in August from an upwardly revised pace of 5.02 million in July, but are
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In the comments sections, WilliamBanzai7 shares with us his latest subprime-debacle-inspired poem. The creative-writing major in me thought it worth a full post.
TARP, you’ll keep in mind, stands for Troubled Asset Relief Plan–what we heretofore have referred to as “the $700 billion bailout.”
Charge of the TARP Brigade
(inspired by …
David Cay Johnston thinks maybe we don’t need this bailout after all—and that journalists aren’t asking the right questions. That we’re at risk of “repeat[ing] the failed lapdog practices that so damaged our reputations in the rush to war in Iraq and the adoption of the Patriot Act.” On a web site of Harvard’s Neiman Foundation for …
House prices are still falling! OFHEO is out with its latest numbers: Home values declined by 0.6% from June to July, and are down 5.3% from a year ago. For the month, prices fell in each of the nine Census divisions OFHEO tracks. That’s a change from prior months, in which home prices continued to appreciate in certain pockets, like the …
I used to work at Mutual Funds magazine, before Time Inc. shut it down, so give a girl a break for caring about the following.
Yesterday American Beacon, a firm that manages $30 billion in assets, sent out word that for the foreseeable future if institutions want to cash out of its money market fund, they’ll have to take at least part …
I just had an interesting conversation with Tom Newton, the co-founder of Institutional Cash Distributors, a company that runs a trading platform for folks like state treasurers and corporate cash managers to buy and sell money markets.
I was curious to know where institutional investors moved their money to after withdrawing it from …
I know AIG was like half a dozen freak-outs ago, but I was still happy to see in the WSJ this morning that the insurance company’s new CEO is talking about what’s next. Happy because I’m sure a lot of people with AIG policies want to know. Here’s an excerpt:
Edward Liddy, the new chief executive of American International Group Inc.,
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This morning Treasury came out saying it would backstop money market mutual funds, shoring up investor confidence to prevent a mass exodus. As I wrote yesterday, that’s the much bigger threat to money markets right now—mass redemptions, not funds marking down the value of bad assets (e.g., commercial paper from the now-bankrupt Lehman …
