financial crisis

With disgraced Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff safely behind bars to serve his 150- year prison sentence, the business of figuring out how he pulled off one of the greatest financial swindles of all time is in full swing. The Washington Post looks at three new books out on Madoff, none of which seem to offer [...]

Joe Weisenthal at Clusterstock finds that inflation will soon hit home for some, with price hikes on the horizon from beer manufacturers and cattle farmers. First, Weisenthal cites a Los Angeles Times story explaining that brewers are being affected by increases in commodity prices, leading them to the unusual step of charging more for beer.
The [...]

As expected, President Obama reappointed Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to another term today today, noting in remarks delivered in Martha’s Vineyard that Bernanke led the nation, and the world, through one of the worst fiscal crises it has ever faced, Bloomberg reports.
“As an expert on the causes of the Great Depression, I’m sure Ben [...]

On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, both Paul Krugman and Robert Reich offered far more pessimistic views of the economy than the rosier outlook put forth by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Friday. Krugman described the economy as languishing in purgatory. Reich explained that the only good news is that the economy is getting [...]

Via Michael Shedlock, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reviews the growing problem of zombie subdivisions, those half-built developments you often see from a highway. Developers broke ground for these subdivisions near the end of the housing boom, and abandoned them when the mortgage crisis hit and financing dried up. Now the subdivisions are a drag on surrounding [...]

Here’s one of the most disturbing points made in the Financial Times piece on banks being poised to earn $38.5 billion in overdraft fees this year: Poorest customers are getting hit the hardest by the charges.
The FT reported over the weekend that banks are using higher fees on overdrafts and credit cards to boost their [...]

New unemployment numbers for July are out today, and they show a slight drop in the jobless rate, to 9.4 percent — the first decline since April of 2008, Bloomberg reports. The pace of job losses also slowed, with payrolls falling by 247,000, compared to a 443,000 loss in June, Labor Department figures show. The [...]

It’s hard to imagine now, but it wasn’t all that long ago when it could be hard to find average folks who knew or cared that much about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the oddly-named, government-sponsored entitites that own or guarantee about half the nation’s mortgages. The obscure workings of the secondary market weren’t exactly [...]

The Treasury Department’s report on the progress — or lack of it — among servicers doing loan modifications makes it seem like the Obama administration is keeping a close eye on its Making Home Affordable Program. But Felix Salmon at Reuters takes a second look at Treasury report, and raises some important questions. Salmon notes [...]

In the latest issue of The New Yorker, James Surowiecki  weighs in on something TWI wrote about recently: The need for a new — and bolder — foreclosure strategy. Foreclosures continue to outpace loan modifications, even as the Obama administration presses the lending industry to do more. And in some communities, it’s not just the [...]