Ben Bernanke News

California, Michigan and South Carolina suffered the most financial pain in May as unemployment, home foreclosures and bankruptcies rose, according to The Associated Press' monthly analysis of economic stress in more than 3,100 U.S. counties.

PREDICTIONS of an early economic recovery may be a false dawn because they are mainly due to government spending and company restocking, an economist with the Economist Intelligence Unit said.

Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown By Edmund L. Andrews W. W. Norton, New York: May 2009 Hardcover, 240 pages, $25.95, 240 pages Gimme Shelter By Mary Elizabeth Williams Simon & Schuster, New York: March 2009 Hardcover, 336 pages, $26.00 If there is anybody who should have avoided the mortgage catastrophe, it is me.

I'd like to start this week by making some clarifying points about last week's column in which I expressed concern over Congress' treatment of the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

So you think China's 6 per cent growth will power a global recovery. Think again.

WASHINGTON Mounting job losses rattled hopes Thursday that the economy is on track to grow later this year, showing that prospects for American workers are terrible and still getting worse.

With various bills intending to reshape how the insurance industry is regulated now advancing in both houses of Congress, Leigh Ann Pusey stepped into the legislative equivalent of a maelstrom when she became president and CEO of the American Insurance Association in February.

The Founding Fathers left one legacy not celebrated on Independence Day but which affects us all.

Employers cut a larger-than-expected 467,000 jobs in June and the unemployment rate climbed to a 26-year high of 9.5 percent.

Americans lucky enough to still have a job are noticing something unpleasant in their paychecks: They're making less money.

"Sell all California paper now!" says Martin Weiss. Sounds like good advice. The petty, brain-dead politicians in California are still engaged in their suicidal, ideological stand-off. Thus, there is absolutely no reason to believe the state has either the will or the sense to take any meaningful steps to come up with the mandatory $24 billion in ...

July 2 -- Mortgage rates in the U.S. fell this week, easing concern the Federal Reserve plan to lower rates by purchasing mortgage-backed securities was losing momentum.

A few more quotable quotes from that new interview with 94-year-old economist Paul Samuelson: The 1980s trained macroeconomics -- like Greg Mankiw and Ben Bernanke and so forth -- became a very complacent group, very ill adapted to meet with a completely unpredictable and new situation, such as we've had.

Out-of-work with no place to land, the legions of America's unemployed are growing.

St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank President James Bullard said on Tuesday that public anger over the U.S. financial crisis and subsequent bailouts could cause big problems if this escalated into a political challenge to the independence of the U.S. central bank.

Evidence that the Fed may have abused its power to pressure Bank of America into acquiring Merrill Lynch could make it unlikely that congress will go along with Obama's plan to extend the Fed's regulatory power.

June 27, 2009 The Structural Deficit It is, I think, much too early to be worrying about closing America's structural deficit through any policies other than trying to set health care cost-containment in motion.

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke's memory seems to be failing at an amazingly convenient time, for Bernanke.

It's a glimpse of what's ahead. There was a time when the chairman of the Federal Reserve would be grilled by Congress over interest rates being too high, or too low, or whether tax increases should be a part of deficit reduction -- in other words, criticism and debate over the Fed's critical tasks involving monetary and fiscal policy.

Tennessee municipalities use loans that have become increasingly risky to finance local government projects more often than other cities and counties elsewhere.