I have long been amazed how often people argue that low-interest rates don’t help the economy. And to be honest I once wandered over to the monetary dark side and wrote a post wondering, because of the confidence issue, whether keeping rates low for such a long period of time was helping the economy. But I have tried to repent since. …
There’s been a lot of rhetoric since Obama announced on Monday a plan to cut the debt by $3.1 trillion over the next decade, a good portion of which would come from raising taxes on the wealthly. The President’s speech itself contained a good bit of hyperbole. The President said that America’s millionaires pay a lower tax rate than …
One of the reasons you hear regularly thrown out to explain why unemployment has remained persistently high this recession and whatever you would call the period we are going through now (recovery, not quite) is state budgets. Government is typically the most reliable employer during a recession. But strapped states are having to …
After the financial crisis, regulators and politicians said they were going to rewrite the rules to ensure that big banks don’t end up with huge losses that put a country’s and indeed the world’s financial system at risk. Allowing the big banks to make big bets was out. And yet, here we go again. On Friday, U.K. authorities charged …
Happy Birthday, Financial Crisis. Three years ago today investment bank Lehman Brothers failed, officially plunging world into the worst financial panic in history (not fact checked – but it seemed really bad). There is surprisingly little coverage of the anniversary today, at least not on the blogs I read. Barry Ritholtz over at the …
Early on in the financial crisis, economists warned that the biggest danger of the bailouts was that we would end up with zombie banks – institutions kept alive by government bailouts, but essentially doomed to rot away. Recent news about Bank of America raises the question as to whether B of A has turned into a classic zombie. On
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Long before the banks started evicting delinquent homeowners, Wall Street, it appears, used robo-signers to ink mortgage deals that would eventually cost investors tens of billions of dollars and in part led to the financial crisis.
Long before the banks started evicting delinquent homeowners, Wall Street, it appears, used robo-signers to ink mortgage deals that would eventually cost investors tens of billions of dollars and in part led to the financial crisis.
According to lawsuits filed last week by the U.S.’s Federal Housing Financing Agency, one individual …
It’s been about two weeks since the Obama administration floated the idea of a massive mortgage refinance, and there seems to be little consensus on whether the plan would provide a boost to either the economy or the housing market.
The plan is to allow the millions of homeowners who have government owned mortgages to refinance those …
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 …
Zippo. Nadda. Goose egg. The big fat one. That’s how many jobs the economy added in August. And that is really bad news.
Perhaps we should have known that this summer – with the near government default, the European debt crisis, the U.S. credit downgrade, and Hurricane Irene – was bad for the economy. But somehow today’s news that …
Call it turnover Thursday. In the past 48 hours, chief executives of three of the U.S.’s largest companies – Bank of New York Mellon, Costco and Bank of New York Mellon – have either called it quits or been shown the door. Perhaps they wanted to make labor day truly a long weekend.
Of the three CEOs to leave their posts, Robert Kelly …
