Articles for Business & Finance

EXCERPT: Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury assured us Thursday that the Administration is on top of the mortgage crises.     A new Bush Administration initiative calls for a series of actions designed to avert the kind of housing and credit crunches that are threatening to throw the nation into recession.   Treasury Secretary Paulson revealed that a presidential working group wants stronger regulatory oversight of mortgage lenders to avert the kind of credit...

EXCERPT: Gold punched through the 1000 USD level last Friday.  Widespread concern about the outlook for the U.S. economy pushed the dollar to a record low of almost $1.59 against the euro.  The euro came on the world financial scene about seven years ago at value of 80 cents.   The Canadian dollar, which has hovered around $0.70 USD for decades, is now valued at $1.01 USD.  And you may have read that the Taj Mahal and other tourist attractions will not accept...

EXCERPT:    The number of foreclosures on “home owners” was nearly 60 percent greater in February than the same month a year ago.   But Bear Stearns will be bailed out, so don’t concern Honeywell’s Phoenix based aerospace division has won a contract to supply flight-control systems for the Gulfstream G650 jet.  The contract could amount to a whopping 3 Billion USD.  The division announced last month that it was laying off 420...

EXCERPT: More and more Average Americans are finding it necessary to sacrifice long term financial planning for immediate survival. 
For each of us as individuals and family units there is a tradeoff: day-to-day vs. “the golden years”.  
For most wage earners, the day-to-day, or cash flow category is the most urgent.  We have to put gas in the tank, food on the table, pay the utilities, put clothes on our back, perhaps take in a movie or eat out on occasion, and so...

EXCERPT:    With the scary threat of bank failures on the rise, it is appropriate to consider just which banks might be most at risk.     We explored briefly the major banks' increased exposure in “Big Credit Cramps”.  But what about the small and midsized banks, and other community institutions such as savings and loans, and credit unions?      It appears that there could be some winners in this debacle. ...

EXCERPT: Most of the large banks have been battered by their own speculative investments.  Speculative from a more traditional banking perspective, that is.     There is even talk now of banks going belly up because of this mess created by the questionable loans and clever repackaging of those sub prime loans by "piggy backing" them on prime loans in these packages for marketing purposes.    A significant part of the problem seems to be...

EXCERPT: General Motors has offered all of its U.S. hourly rate employees, all 74,000 of them, a buyout plan. If employees sever ties completely with the company, no pension, no health benefits, they could be paid a $140,000 lump sum. The article at CNNMoney.com said that 46,000 of the employees are eligible for retirement right now and will be given pension incentives to do so. Two things come to mind when reading this. First, there are only 74,000 hourly workers left at GM? The once proud...

EXCERPT:          t should have been predictable, although I have seen no predictions of it.  A Sovereign Wealth Superfund for the Third World.         Hugo Chavez, the leftist President of Venezuela and one of many of Dubya’s ardent fans around the world, proposed Saturday to his allies that they begin withdrawing billions of dollars in international reserves out of U.S. banks.     ...

EXCERPT: Stephen Jen, an economist with Morgan Stanley, monitors 29 sovereign-wealth funds with an aggregate buddle of $2.9 trillion    The UAE’s Abu Dhabi Investment Authority gets a lot of the attention today because of its huge reserves of US Dollars from its sale of Oil to the world (oil transactions still being denominated in USDs), and the fact that it is investing in our banks.  That fund is at the top of the list with estimated assets of $875 ...

EXCERPT: First world financial services groups have had the wind knocked out of them by the sub-prime mess, a mess largely of their own making.  Now the developing world is administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as vast foreign holdings of U.S. debt are beginning to be recycled through the so-called sovereign-wealth      The infusion of funds just over the last ten months, according to Morgan Stanely, has amounted to a cool 69 Billion USD.    ...