Meredith Whitney may end up being right about about the municipal bond market.
Late last year, the Wall Street analyst famous for predicting the financial crisis began warning that the municipal bond market may be headed for a crash. Whitney predicted that there could be as many as 100 municipalities that end up being unable to pay …
Step One: Follow lots of people.
If you want to make millions of dollars and beat the stock market using Twitter – the social media king of mini-messages – you are going to have to read a lot of tweets. About 100 million a week. That’s what a London hedge fund Derwent Capital Markets, which launched earlier this month, is doing. And it …
If you are on your own, you’re probably not saving enough for retirement. That’s the conclusion of a new study published this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research on retirement readiness from two researchers at the …
UPDATED (10:45, July 12th)
QE3 here we come, perhaps.
Last month, when Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke did his second press conference following a meeting of the U.S. central bank’s policy makers’ committee, he seemed to suggest that the Fed was unlikely to launch a new round of its controversial bond buying program. The second …
Forget jobs. Where are the workers?
The unemployment rate rose and job growth was nearly non-existent in what was probably the most disappointing piece of economic news since the start of the recovery in mid-2009. The government …
Forget jobs. Where are the workers?
The unemployment rate rose and job growth was nearly non-existent in what was probably the most disappointing piece of economic news since the start of the recovery in mid-2009. The government reported on Friday that employers added just 18,000 workers in June. That was the slowest rate of job …
A few years ago, policy wonks, retirement experts and politicians came up with what they thought was a great way to fix the 401(k) system: automatic enrollment. So in 2006, they passed a law that allowed businesses to put a …
A few years ago, policy wonks, retirement experts and politicians came up with what they thought was a great way to fix the 401(k) system – automatic enrollment. So in 2006, they passed a law that allowed businesses to put a portion of their employees’ money into 401(k) plans without their permission. The employees were of course …
There are a number of possible reasons the recovery has been slower than expected. Foreclosures. Banks making fewer loans. American companies doing more of their hiring overseas. The adoption of new regulations to stop another financial crisis. My colleague Roya Wolverson has discussed, here and here, the things that could be a …
Is Congressman Ron Paul our savior?
The Republican, and libertarian, who is running for President, again, in the past few days has been floating a plan that has the potential to end the debt ceiling standoff, for now, and eliminate the growing possibility that the U.S. government could have to default on its debt, which could cause …
And you thought the economy was headed for a double dip.
On Friday, the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) reported that its gauge of manufacturing activity rose in June to 55.3. That was slightly higher than economists expected. Stocks shot up on the news, capping off a week where the Dow Jones industrial average is up about 5%. A …
Federal Reserve’s Ben Bernanke (Reuters)
At the end of the day, the Federal Reserve’s program to purchase $600 billion of medium term bonds, which has been dubbed QE2 – because it was the Fed’s second round of trying to lower interest rates by buying bonds, which in economic terms is called quantitative easing – did complete the task …
