rssPosts by Megan Carpentier
Unemployment Predictions Highlight the Need for Investment in Job Training
While the Congressional Black Caucus (among others) pushed unsuccessfully for a major investment in job training to be included in the stimulus package, new data on the long-term prospects for a labor market recovery highlight the ongoing need for the president and Congress to put job More…
Obama’s New Mortgage Modification Plan Relies on Banks’ Beneficence
President Obama today unveiled his administration’s fourth attempt to stave off the worst effects of the mortgage and housing crisis, the latest in a series of efforts that started with the Home Affordable Modification Program and now includes special assistance for the hardest-hit states and incentives for banks More…
Five States With the Biggest Drops in Income, and the Four That Gained in 2009
As everyone already knows, 2009 was a terrible economic year for a lot of Americans, but some people had it worse than others. A handy table in today’s Wall Street Journal allows us to break down the five states that had the biggest declines in per capita income, More…
Recession Pushes Young People Out of the Labor Market
While America’s older workers are taking longer and longer to find work, spending, on average, 35 weeks between jobs, America’s youngest working generation is having trouble finding any jobs — and sometimes dropping out of the rat race completely. Tony Pugh of McClatchy reports:
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Mortgage Modifications Don’t Decrease Monthly Payments for Many, Causing Defaults
The Comptroller of the Currency’s new report on the mortgage market in the fourth quarter of 2009 also sheds light on some of the problems reported by borrowers accepting all temporary and permanent HAMP modifications (including ones in HAMP) — problems which, left unchecked, will likely More…
Prime Mortgage Holders Took a Beating in 2009
The Comptroller of the Currency keeps an eye on the mortgage market, and the results continue to be terrible. They monitor 64 percent of the mortgages in the United States, or 34 million loans, from most of the mortgage servers in a portfolio representing the larger market: About two-thirds of More…
Yet Another Failure for the Mortgage Modification Program
President Obama’s mortgage modification program, known as the Home Affordable Modification Program or HAMP, was supposed to be the fulfillment of Obama’s promise to take care of Main Street more than Wall Street. Yet, just over a year into his presidency, Wall Street is on the rise and Main Street More…
Lehman and Greece Weren’t Alone in Cooking the Books
As it if weren’t enough that Greece and Lehman Brothers were caught shifting their debts off the books with the help of a variety of irregular accounting measures, today’s news is that Bank of America has likely been doing it, too. John Hempton of Bronte Capital More…
Only 16 Executives Changed Companies After Pay Caps
After months of whining, a resignation letter delivered on the op-ed page of The New York Times and warnings of a massive corporate brain drain, only 16 executives have left bailed-out companies amid pay caps in the past two years. Pay Czar Kenneth Feinberg set pay More…
SEC Employees Viewed Porn While Rome (and Wall Street) Burned
Well, we knew that SEC employees weren’t policing the Lehman Brothers or sharing information on its collapse with the Fed and they weren’t getting Goldman to disclose how much money Tim Geithner got AIG to pay them from the U.S. Treasury in a timely fashion, and More…
