Do you ever feel like you’re in the Twilight Zone?

Financial news is getting more bizarre by the day. Take today’s new for example.
Citibank’s stock price soared over news that it didn’t lose as much money Wall Street expected it to. The quarterly loss was only $966 million and revenue doubled to $24.79 billion.
Is the $45 billion we gave them since October counted in this?
I [...]

Congo forces leaders to pay taxes – ours?

The Democratic Republic of Congo, faced with a fiscal crisis, is now forcing their leaders to pay taxes. Reuters reports
Amid a growing budget shortfall, the government is under pressure to cut costs and boost tax revenues.
Budget Minister Michel Lokola told Reuters that last month’s decision to tax government salaries at source, rather than rely on [...]

Bailing out investors won’t help the economy

Reuters led the story of yesterday’s stock market rally with the following:
Stocks rose on Wednesday, with the benchmark S&P 500 index attempting the first two-day advance in a month, as investors held out hope that Washington would restore confidence in banks by relieving them of money-losing assets.
This is a rather disingenuous conclusion to derive from [...]

Clinton, Rubin and Summers, Graham, Leach and Bliley – thank you

In the early 1900’s, commercial banks began to establish security affiliates that floated bond issues and underwrote corporate stock issues. (In underwriting, a bank guarantees to furnish a definite sum of money by a definite date to a business or government entity in return for an issue of bonds or stock.)
Then the stock market crashed.
In [...]

So why are we asking the experts anything?

NABE, the National Association of Business Economists, today released the results of their annual member survey. Reuters reports they predicted “the recession-hit economy would begin to recover in the second half of this year, returning to a potential growth trend in 2010.”
I wondered who these people were, and if they were the same people that [...]