And people honestly wonder why the Occupy movement was/is necessary?

U.S. sues Wells Fargo in mortgage fraud case(Reuters) - The U.S. government filed a civil mortgage fraud lawsuit on Tuesday against Wells Fargo & Co, the latest legal volley against big banks for their lending during the housing boom ( Read more... )

In a post on June 9 of this year, I wrote this:

The US bank bailout was around $700 billion (and to think that Republicans bitch about the small fraction of that given to General Motors), so when you consider that Spain's GDP is about a tenth the size of ours, this bailout will basically be bigger than the American version, assuming that €100 ( Read more... )

By most measures, more Americans than ever now shun any party affiliation, preferring to call themselves independents. And look what it has gotten us: Perfect gridlock. The Democrats have the White House, the Republicans have the House, the Senate is evenly split, and the Supreme Court is so deadlocked that any decision that's not an obvious 9-0 ( Read more... )

I just listened to an interview on the BBC with the former finance minister of Greece, the one who discovered the extent of Greek debt and had to go to the EU finance ministers, hat in hand, asking for a rescue. Although he was only referring to the situation in Greece, he made a comment that elegantly sums up the financial crisis all over the ( Read more... )

Marketplace wrapped up its tour of European bars last week with stops in Germany and GreeceWhat struck me in these interviews, as with the three earlier ones, is how much more sophisticated a world view Europeans have compared with the average American. Remember that all of the interviews in the "Pub Crawl" series were with ordinary people at bars ( Read more... )

. . . and he says, "Ouch". Sorry.

Anyway, Stephen Beard, a correspondent for NPR's Marketplace has been doing an interesting series of stories this week called "Pub Crawl". He's been touring European bars and asking the patrons about their views on the current state of the economy. Yeah I know, nice work if you can get it right ( Read more... )

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that after going down for a few years, the average size of an American home is creeping back up again. The following couple of paragraphs jumped out at me:

A major driver behind the bigger-home trend is record-low interest rates, under 4% for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, which allow some buyers to move ( Read more... )

So we're having another damn bank bailout. Reports are that euro zone countries may have to provide as much as $125 billion (€100 billion) to bail out Spanish banks. It's the same old familiar story: Spain had a real estate bubble that crashed, one thing led to another and, well, now a bunch of extraordinarily wealthy Wall Street-types need ( Read more... )

Yesterday, I wrote about Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman's interview on NPR where he shared his ideas for getting the global economy moving again. In what I assume to be an attempt at balance, the same show (NPR's Marketplace) did an interview with Stanford professor John Taylor, who was an economist in the Bush Regime. His ideas for ( Read more... )

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman weighed in today on how to fix the economy in an interview on NPR. Among his key points ( Read more... )