Economics
Wallet Pop | You don't need the U.S. Misery Index to tell you that things are bad in the U.S. Unemployment is near or at all-time highs in many parts of the country, foreclosures continue to happen at unprecedented rates and there are some very real indicators that we are heading toward a ...
DisInfo | But forgive me for believing that those who serve interests have more clout that those that just speak out on issues. There are hidden relationships that sometimes predetermine what stories get media attention and which do not.
Wow O Wow | The woman once known here as "Austria’s woman on Wall Street" has disappeared. Kohn collected more than $2 billion from rich investors in Russia and across Europe for Bernard Madoff through her firm, Bank Medici.
New York Times | When the commission filed a motion to seize the United States assets of the companies, less than $100,000 was recovered. It hopes to recover sums transferred abroad, but Mr. Wernikoff says that “it’s going to take some time.”
New York Times | Thomas M. Hoenig, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, dissented on Tuesday when the Federal Open Market Committee voted 9 to 1 to invest proceeds from the Fed’s mortgage-bond portfolio in longer-term Treasury debt.
Information Liberation | The United States by every measure is hanging on by a thread to its First World status. Saddled by debt, engaged in wars on multiple fronts with a rising police state at home, declining economic productivity, and wild currency fluctuations all threaten America's futur...
Alternet | The government’s $182 billion bailout of insurance giant AIG should be seen as the Rosetta Stone for understanding the financial crisis and its costly aftermath. The story of American International Group explains the larger catastrophe not because this was the biggest corporate ba...
Truth Alliance | This desperate plea for help from the Obama Administration by the State of Wyoming to raise funds is unfortunately misdirected and a logical fallacy - considering that the Federal Reserve and the big banks are the very institutions that have overseen the biggest collapse of fai...
Reuters | California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency over the state's finances on Wednesday, raising pressure on lawmakers to negotiate a state budget that is more than a month overdue and will need to close a $19 billion shortfall.
Bloomberg | The package arrived at Cindy Lohman’s home in Great Mills, Maryland, just two weeks after she learned that her son, Ryan, a 24-year-old Army sergeant, had been killed by a bomb in Afghanistan. It was a thick, 9-inch-by- 12-inch envelope from Prudential Financial Inc., which handles life...
Associated Press | A U.S. audit has found that the Pentagon cannot account for over 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraq reconstruction money, spotlighting Iraqi complaints that there is little to show for the massive funds pumped into their cash-strapped, war-ravaged nation.
USA Today |He added, "We thought originally we were bailing out AIG. Then later on ... we learned that the money flowed through AIG to a few big banks, and now we know that the money went from these few big banks to dozens of financial institutions all around the world."
Yahoo Finance | The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.
The Nation | The American people are hurting. As a result of the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street, millions of Americans have lost their jobs, homes, life savings and their ability to get a higher education. Today, some 22 percent of our children live in poverty, and milli...
Car Connection | It appears the recent economic downturn and spate of fuel price rises has not only changed the types of cars we buy, but also the way we pay for them. The latest study by independent vehicle pricing and information authority Kelley Blue Book has revealed that new car buyers ar...
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New York Times | The housing bust that began among the working class in remote subdivisions and quickly progressed to the suburban middle class is striking the upper class in privileged enclaves like this one in Silicon Valley.
Huffington Post | As reported on HuffPost last week, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has expressed opposition to the possible nomination of Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to a source with knowledge of Geithner's views.
Truth-Out | After living through the Great Financial Crash of 2008, just about everybody recognizes that megabanks screwed the economy hard and were rewarded with big bailouts, which further screwed over, well, everybody, in the name of banker bonuses. But Big Finance has been waging its war on ...
Business Insider | The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.
Telegraph | It takes a lot to spook the solid old gold market. But when it emerged last week that one or more banks had lent 380 tonnes of gold to the Bank of International Settlements in return for foreign currencies, there was widespread surprise and confusion
Alternet | The riches of the wealthiest North Americans grew by double digits in 2009, primarily from interest their money earned when it was invested in the stock market and elsewhere, according to a report by the Boston Consulting Group.
Z Space | We just witnessed justice on steroids. Ten Russian “spies”—even if we still don’t know what they were spying on or why—were brought to court, copped a plea, and were on their way out of the country by midnight.
ABC | Did you think the housing collapse killed off "liar loans"--those infamous bubble-era mortgages for which people were allowed to get creative in portraying their ability to make the payments? Well, they're back, and that may be a good thing.
Counterpunch | Europe is committing fiscal suicide – and will have little trouble finding allies at this weekend’s G-20 meetings in Toronto. Despite the deepening Great Recession threatening to bring on outright depression, European Central Bank (ECB) president Jean-Claude Trichet and prime mini...
Business Insider | So is this good news or bad news? Well, for the stocks in the near-term, additional buying support provides price support, and if you think a company is undervalued then you should be happy with it buying back its shares since this will increase the value per share of its rem...
Independent | By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You're wrong. There's more. It turns out that the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all.
Alternet | We are living at the dawn of the freelance world, as more and more people find themselves working as consultants, contract workers or freelancers. This change in the way we work is as profound as the shift that occurred during the industrial revolution.
Bloomberg | Initial jobless claims increased by 13,000 to 472,000 in the week ended June 26, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The number of people receiving unemployment insurance rose, while those getting emergency benefits dropped after Congress failed to act on extending the l...
Center for Economic and Policy Research | There is considerable concern that the debt burden that United States will face by the end of the next decade will place serious strains on the government and the economy. It is not clear how high the debt can go before it begins to hamper economic gr...
BBC | In the case of Mr Murray, Mr Ibbotson said: "We worked with Mr Murray over about a year and a half in difficult times, and we got to the position at the end where we felt the right thing to do for the bank and for the taxpayer was to work with Mr Murray and work out how he could repay ...
Bloomberg | Just before sunset on April 10, 2006, a DC-9 jet landed at the international airport in the port city of Ciudad del Carmen, 500 miles east of Mexico City. As soldiers on the ground approached the plane, the crew tried to shoo them away, saying there was a dangerous oil leak.
AFP | US investment giant Goldman Sachs has been ordered to pay 20.6 million dollars to the creditors of the collapsed hedge fund Bayou Group for ignoring signs of fraud, according to the arbitration panel's decision revealed Saturday.
My Way | A woman who needed powered oxygen equipment to breathe died after she did not pay the power bill and a utility shut off her electricity, police said Friday. State officials were investigating whether any regulations were broken.
Chicago Tribune | A new credit card rule that limits late fees will reduce annual earnings of Discover Financial Services by $80 million to $90 million a year, Chief Executive David Nelms said Thursday. Under Federal Reserve rules effective Aug. 22, credit card companies can't charge a l...
BBC | The former boss of the now bankrupt US lender Taylor, Bean & Whitaker (TBW) has been charged with 16 counts of fraud, worth more than $1.9bn (£1.3bn). Lee Farkas, who was chief executive and then chairman of TBW, was accused of trying to misappropriate money from banks and federal...
Wall Street Journal | Bank of America Corp. and other banks are preparing new fees on basic banking services as they try to replace revenue lost to regulatory rules, in a push that is expected to spell an end to free checking accounts for many Americans.
Huffington Post | Some of the nation’s largest and most elite universities stand to gain millions of dollars from selling the names and addresses of students and alumni to credit card companies while granting the companies special access to school events, the Huffington Post Investigative Fund ...
Reuters | The Federal Reserve scored a political victory on Wednesday as Democrats mulling financial reform backed off measures that would expose monetary policy to audits and make the head of the New York Fed a political appointee.
Reuters | Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAC.N) has ordered its traders not to enter into oil trades with BP Plc (BP.L) that extend beyond June 2011, a market source familiar with the directive told Reuters. The order to the bank's traders came from a high-level executive and was made on ...
Telegraph | The chief executive of BP sold £1.4 million of his shares in the fuel giant weeks before the Gulf of Mexico oil spill caused its value to collapse.
BBC | The firm's shares closed down 6% in London having earlier plunged 12%. And the row over the spill has moved to Westminster - with calls for the UK government to try to ease relations between BP and the White House.
THOA | Where did the word 'marijuana' come from? In the mid 1930s, the M-word was created to tarnish the good image and phenomenal history of the hemp plant...as you will read. The facts cited here, with references, are generally verifiable in th...
TG Daily | This past week, Deutsche Bank's proprietary trading unit put in a whacko order for the Nikkei 250 which could have resulted in a $182 billion mistrade, or if you prefer your end of world scenarios in bigger numbers, a 16.7 trillion yen disaster.
Prison Planet | Appearing on The Alex Jones Show yesterday, Congressman Ron Paul revealed that through his inside sources he had learned that the people who control the Federal Reserve are panicking about the fact that Americans are waking up to the fact that the U.S. is controlled by the c...
Market Watch | Yes, I am mad as hell again. Wall Street's soulless, immoral, greedy bankers really believe that the vast majority of America's 95 million investors are not only "predictably irrational" but "stupid," as J.P. Morgan Chase's chief investment officer put it in Forbes a while back.
Times Online | The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), a London-based consultancy, has warned Greek ministers they will be unable to escape their debt trap without devaluing their own currency to boost exports. The only way this can happen is if Greece returns to its own currency.
Reuters | Antioch's leaders earlier this month said bankruptcy could be an option for the cash-strapped city of roughly 100,000 on the eastern fringe of the San Francisco Bay area.
Business Insider | The lesser charge is omitting or misstating disclosures to investors. It would also reduce the threat of lawsuits and avoid the firm's have to settle a fraud charge.
Mother Jones | Michael Clauer is a captain in the Army Reserve who commanded over 100 soldiers in Iraq. But while he was fighting for his country, a different kind of battle was brewing on the home front. Last September, Michael returned to Frisco, Texas, to find that his homeowners' association...