At a Cambridge House Investment Conference I received a question about Bear Stearns.  In my answer I alluded to the possible financial benefit of some from its implosion.  When pressed I had to explain how credit default swaps worked and then we were out of time.  Because the owners of the majority of the financial [...]

With the U.S. credit crunch gone global and the $700 billion bailout package now looking like a small drop of water in a tidal wave of woe, the question of blame is now all over the media.
Who caused this mess?
If you read the Wall Street Journal you could easily come away thinking that the whole [...]

For at least a year now, ordinary people in the United States (people the press has been referring to as “Main Street”) have known that the economy was starting to slow down at the same time that prices were rising uncomfortably fast.
Now, some economists are finally starting to admit that, yes, the U.S. probably went [...]

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was set up as a reaction to the stock market crash of 1929 to provide oversight of brokerage firms and protect investors. Last month, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., filed to become bank holding companies. Now with the sale of Bear Stearns, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers [...]

On October 7, American Express revealed that they will begin limiting their customers’ access to credit based on both where they shop and which bank holds their primary mortgage. While there is nothing in the law that prevents American Express (or any other credit card company) from doing this, the announcement is noteworthy coming [...]

The Federal Reserve was created 95 years ago to prevent banking crises as an independent agency whose Washington-based governors are appointed by the president of the United States and confirmed by the Senate. Its officials usually steer clear of the most heated political debates in a bid to protect their freedom to make the tough [...]

The U.S. stock market has been nothing if not volatile this year, especially over the course of the past few weeks. As the current credit crisis tightened and the world watched in horror, what most people saw was the stock market spiking and plummeting, often on mere rumor and speculation, and sometimes on the [...]

Evelyn Black wrote a great blog on September 26 explaining the financial inter-connectedness of the U.S. and China. To sum it up, she says that the U.S. imports more from China than it exports to China. This difference, the trade deficit, is made up by the Chinese government’s investment in U.S. government debt. In other [...]

Several questions during the last few days pointed out the obvious: lost in the media coverage of the American financial crisis and the tail end of the presidential election seems to be the fact that there really is news beyond Wall Street and Main Street.
I could not agree more.
For example, how much attention has been [...]

When I was a kid (I’m 55 now), I looked forward to holiday dinners because that was when my parents and my grandparents held their traditional “Was FDR a scoundrel or a savior?” debate. My grandparents, who worked for public utilities and, thus, survived the Great Depression with conservative opinions intact, argued for FDR the [...]