Hank Paulson almost completely changed the goals of the Treasury’s $700 billion bailout plan. He did so without checking with Congress which appropriated the funds and wanted to check in on Paulson from time-to-time.…
At the beginning of every alarming recession the questiongets raised whether this one is the next "Great Depression". The answer is "yes" for the millions of people who have lostjobs and homes. Their collective…
Henry Paulson’s newest idea for his $700 billion bailout fund is to get private equity firms to invest side-by-side with him in the next series of financial firms that will get money. This will…
John Thain of Merrill Lynch (MER) spent most of his time at the financial firm saying that the markets would improve as would the fortunes of his company. He was consistently and remarkably wrong.…
Even the nation’s oldest and richest university cannot escape the economic downturn. In a note to to almost everyone affiliated with the institution, President Drew Gilpin Faust said the the value of the university’s…
From Goldman Sachs (GS) by way of MarketWatch: "The unemployment rate is expected to rise to 8.5% by the end of next year and inch even higher in early 2010, economists for Goldman Sachs…
If you were looking for great news on the jobs report this morning, you probably believed the guy telling that "NOT JOKE" in the Borat movie. Unemployment came in at a monstrous 6.5%…
We have just seen the figure for weekly jobless claims, and it is an ugly prelude to tomorrow’s unemployment and non-farm payroll data. The good news is that worker productivity came in better than…
A little note from the Bank of England: "The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee today voted to reduce the official Bank Rate paid on commercial bank reserves by 1.5 percentage points to 3%.…
There is not a man with a typewriter who can avoid writing about how much debt the US government has and how much more it will have to take on. Paulson’s program will put…
For awhile, analysts had hoped that the biggest layoffs in the economy would be restricted to already troubled industries including retail, automotive, and airlines. At least companies in those sectors were losing money. But,…
Anyone looking at the stock market over the last week would assume that the global recession is over, the liquidity crisis which has ruined the banking system has been addressed, and consumers are suddenly…
Economist Nouriel Roubini has as dark a vision of the economy as any man with an IQ over 140. His latest prediction is that China will fall apart. Not much of a prediction given…
The US unemployment rate in September was 6.1%. The consensus estimates are that the numbers will rise, but there are differences over how much. The Bloomberg News survey of economists gives an average prediction…
Many of the layoff announcements which came over the last several days were as unexpected as they were large. If a recession is measured by the rapidity and breadth of job losses across huge…