The American system of retirement saving is in big trouble. Not so much Social Security: That has some long-term funding issues, but they are–actuarily, if not politically–easily fixable. The big problems are with workplace pensions and retirement accounts.
As everybody knows, the corporate pension system that evolved after World War …
Now is probably not the time to saunter into your boss’s office and demand a flexible work arrangement involving telecommuting or job-sharing or scaling back to part-time. Or is it?
I’ve been getting and making a lot of calls from colleagues since my company announced layoffs this month. One thing I learned from an off-the-record source …
I’m not saying you should ignore cars and gas, but I always love playing with the numbers in reports like this.
The headline is that retail sales were down 2.8% in October, the worst one month decline since this particular economic series was launched in 1992. That historical fact is not quite as ominous as it might sound, given that …
In the comments section of another post, Curmudgeon57 writes: “I’m not sure it was that everyone [investors, banks, etc.] ignored risk because they thought that the government would step in. I just think they ignored risk.”
That reminded me that I somehow forgot to promote this story I wrote for our magazine’s Global Business section. …
Larry Fink, the BlackRock CEO who has found himself playing a central role in our recent financial tumult time and again, gave a speech today at a conference put on by NYU’s Schack Institute of Real Estate. It was a pretty good speech, so even though I’m getting around to it late in the day, I thought I’d put up a greatest hits version …
The signature moment of today’s long House committee hearing on hedge funds came deep in the Q&A. Massachusetts Democrat John Tierney looked at hedge fund manager John Paulson, who earlier had offered some pointed suggestions on how Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson ought to be using the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, and …
Yesterday was Hank Paulson Day. Today it’s John Paulson’s turn. The hedge fund manager, who took home a $3.7 billion paycheck last year by betting on the mortgage bust, is one of several hedgie bigwigs testifying before Henry Waxman’s Committee and Oversight and Government Reform. They’re only just getting to the Q&A, but I loved this …
My column in the soon-to-be-on-newsstands TIME, which isn’t online yet, is about fiscal stimulus. So is Joe Klein’s column, which is online. It’s stimulus week!
Anyway, one stimulus idea that I didn’t get to, but really like, was one proposed by Alan Blinder last summer, Cash for Clunkers. Wrote Blinder:
Cash for Clunkers is a generic
…
I wrote a piece for Time.com about Hank Paulson’s chat with the world this morning. It begins:
It was his first formal public defense and explanation of his actions since the dust settled from the financial panic of late September and early October, and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson had clearly been thinking about it for a while.
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GE has just announced (pdf) that GE Capital has been approved to participate in the FDIC’s Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program. The FDIC will now guarantee all GE Capital debt (subject to some limits) issued between this Friday and June 30, 2009. Banks already have this deal. Now GE Capital does too.
As an interesting side-note, GE …
As the pink slips start appearing on workers’ desks, many of us are likely to stomp home and mix ourselves something good and stiff from the part of the liquor cabinet that normally gathers dust. On our third whiskey sour, the probability of snapping open our laptops and firing off a pissed-off e-mail to our bosses goes up about …
While Justin has had his eye on Hank Paulson, I’ve been listening to the House hearing on how well investors, servicers and lenders are going along with mortgage modifications.
Barney Frank had nice things to say about the efforts of Frannie, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America (never mind that B of A got sued into changing the terms of …
