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• Bullard: Fed Must Buy US Debt if Deflation Flares
  
  A Federal Reserve official says the central bank should revive a crisis-era program to buy government debt if the country seems headed toward a bout with deflation.James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, makes the case in comments to reporters and...
• Trump Urges Obama to Extend Bush Tax Cuts
  Donald Trump, the real-estate mogul and reality TV star, opposes President Barack Obama s effort to deny an extension of the Bush era tax cuts for people with income of more than $200,000 a year. The cuts, enacted in 2001 and 2003, will be revoked next year for all income...
• Muni Bond Payouts Scare Wall Street
  
  Two years after the financial crisis, Wall Street brokerage firms reportedly are being ordered to pay millions to investors who lost big on what some thought were low-risk municipal-bond fund investments. Reimbursements thus far have included $2.1 million paid to one...
• Credit Crisis Sparks Increase in Mafia Lending
  Until recently, it appeared that short sellers were the only ones to benefit from the financial crisis. Now you can apparently add the mafia to that list. The crime group has stepped up its money laundering operations in Italy, as bank credit grew scarce in the wake of...
• Goldman: End of Fiscal Stimulus Will Dent Growth
  The approaching end of the government spending mandated in last year s $787 billion stimulus package is bad news for the economy, says Goldman Sachs economist Alec Phillips. This adds almost a full percentage point to the drag on growth from the fourth quarter of 2010 to...
• Pessimistic Economists Expect Recovery to Endure
  
  The U.S. economic recovery will remain slow deep into next year, held back by shoppers reluctant to spend and employers hesitant to hire, according to an Associated Press survey of leading economists.The latest quarterly AP Economy Survey shows economists have turned...
• Steve Forbes Endorses Peter Schiff for U.S. Senate
  Steve Forbes, editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine and CEO of Forbes Inc., has endorsed Peter Schiff's bid for U.S. Senate in Connecticut. I have known Peter Schiff for several years. He has a deep knowledge of finance and economics, saidForbes. He had long warned of...
• Budget Chief: Foolish to Cut Deficit in Weak Recovery
  
  White House budget chief Peter Orszag said on Wednesday it would be foolish to cut the U.S. deficit while economic growth was still frail, but it would be equally foolish not to significantly curb the deficit by 2015. Orszag told an audience at The Brookings Institution,...
• Buffett's Dairy Queen Turns Chilly in Blizzard Lawsuit
  
  It's a case that has left Warren Buffett's Dairy Queen business cold. International Dairy Queen Inc., the ice-cream company owned by the billionaire investor's Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has asked a court to stop a southern California rival from selling a frozen yogurt with...
• Economists: Bailouts Prevented Second Depression
  
  Government intervention during the financial crisis saved the economy from a fate worse than the Great Recession, say economists Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi. Blinder is a professor at Princeton and was vice chairman of the Federal Reserve in the Clinton administration....
• Treasury Will Cut Small-Business Lending
  
  The Treasury Department reportedly plans to curtail two Troubled Relief Asset Programs (TARP) originally intended to help consumer and small-business lending. Treasury officials told The Wall Street Journal that they will close a $30 billion program that was intended to...
• BlackRock's Doll: Double-Dip Recession Unlikely
  A double-dip recession is unlikely, and stocks can rise if second-quarter earnings come in stronger than expected, says Robert Doll, chief equity strategist at BlackRock. Economic growth slowed to 2.7 percent in the first quarter, and many experts expect another reading...
• Goldman’s O’Neill: Weak Growth May Help Stocks
  Stocks will likely benefit as economic growth slows after the end of fiscal stimulus, says Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O Neill. Stocks will benefit because the growth slowdown will force the Federal Reserve to maintain its monetary stimulus, he told CNBC. I think...
• California Town Thrives by Outsourcing All Its Jobs
  
  Maywood, Calif., has become the first city in the country to fire all its workers and outsource their jobs to combat financial woes. To be sure, many of the municipal workers were hired back on a contract basis, The New York Times reports. The city of about 50,000 is just...
• Soros Seeks Stake In Bombay Stock Market
  
  Billionaire financier George Soros is in late stage talks to buy a 4 percent stake in the Bombay Stock Exchange as foreign interest in India's financial markets grows, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. Citing a person involved in the negotiations, the newspaper...
• Facebook Alleges Disputed Contract Likely Forged
  
  The contract upstate New York resident Paul Ceglia has produced to claim he s entitled to a majority stake in Facebook may well be forged, according to Facebook officials. Ceglia, who owns a wood pellet fuel company in Wellsville, N.Y., has sued Facebook, claiming a 2003...
• Shilling: Liquidation Isn’t Over as Double Dip Looms
  
  The recent selloff in stocks has been in lockstep with a decline in commodity prices and rallies in the dollar and Treasury bonds, says economist A. Gary Shilling, leading investors to look for a new theory of market behavior. Double-dip recession would seem to fit the...
• Redleaf: Reform Does Nothing to Alleviate Fear
  The new Wall Street reform law leaves in place the same uncertainty that led to the financial crisis, says Andrew Redleaf, CEO of hedge fund managers Whitebox Advisors. The Obama administration is continuing the mistakes of the Bush administration by codifying the worst...
• Pimco Offers Market Collapse Protection
  Money manager Pimco plans to offer investors a fund that will protect them against plunges of more than 15 percent in financial markets. Bloomberg, which reported Pimco s plans, dubbed the fund Black Swan protection, after the book The Black Swan, written by Nassim...
• Jim Rogers: Another Recession to Hit by 2012
  
  Jim Rogers, chairman of Rogers Holdings, thinks another recession will hit around 2012 but central banks will not be able to throw cash at it anymore. We do have inflation in the world … most central banks should resign, Rogers told CNBC. There has always been a...
• Shiller: I Actually Expect a Double-Dip Recession
  
  The state of the U.S. economy is worrisome and there is a high possibility of a double-dip recession, one of the property market's most well-known economists said Tuesday. Robert Shiller, professor of economics at Yale University and co-developer of Standard and Poor's S...
• Schwarzenegger Could Leave Calif. Without Budget
  
  Without a budget resolution in sight, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger hinted Monday that he might not sign a budget before he leaves office next January unless he gets the reforms he wants.California faces a $19 billion deficit for the fiscal year that began July 1, and...
• Treasury: Global Economy Still Needs Support
  Nations must not pull back too quickly on economic stimulus because the global recovery still needs support, a top U.S. Treasury Department official said. The pace of exit strategy has to be carefully calibrated. We have to be careful not to have an overly accelerated...
• U.S. to Track Gold Coin Sales
  
  The Obamacare health reform bill gives the U.S. government the power to track sales of gold coins and other precious metals, analysts say, letting the government know exactly who is buying and selling gold, silver and platinum, and how much the sales contained. The...
• Furchtgott-Roth: Recovery Hinges on GOP Victory
  
  The economy needs a victory by Republicans in the November congressional elections to make a speedy recovery, says Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. If current policies continue, the economy may take five to six years to rebound, just as...

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