NEW YORK | The US are anxious over Greece. Wall Street fell on Wednesday and the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its biggest one-day decline this year. Treasury 10-year note yields traded below 2 percent as European leaders work on an eventual €130 billion financial bailout for Athens at their next meeting on February 20. Investors did not hide their worries: “As much as we’d like to ignore Greece and…
NEW YORK | While Europe is determined to cut the deficit now and see what happens later, the Obama administration has chosen the other way: spend now, cut in the long term. As the president has just put it “[We] can’t just cut our way into growth.” Not willing to risk the improvement the US economy is experiencing, he has sent to Congress a $3.8 trillion budget for the fiscal…
NEW YORK | They call it Obama’s reluctant blessing: the US president has given top bundlers the green light to raise cash for the political organization that supports him, Priorities USA Action. Barack Obama was an outspoken critic of the 2010 Supreme Court’s decision that allowed these so called super Political Action Committees (Super PAC’s) to raise unlimited amounts of money from corporations, unions or individuals. An increasingly big group…
NEW YORK, LONDON | If one of the intentions of the Spanish labour reform announced this Friday was to create headlines –like Mario Monti’s Salva Italia plan did– and calm the international money markets assuring that Spain was on the right track to make labour market more flexible, it miserably failed. Last Friday, when the ‘very aggressive’ labour revamp was announced, the major business networks, the ones that money makers…
NEW YORK | You update your status. You share last weekend pictures in the snow and react on your colleague’s comments to the football game. You browse and snoop on people’s stuff and hit on the like and dislike buttons over and over… and everything goes into Facebook’s giant database. With 845 million users around the world (up 39% from 2010), the company is preparing for a public offering that…
NEW YORK | It would be great news for hundreds of thousands of people: billions of dollars (an estimated $25 billion) in aid to homeowners who have lost their homes to foreclosure or who are still at risk. The money would come from big mortgage banks: Bank of America, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial. Why on earth would those banks be willing to pay that amount? They…
NEW YORK | “Corporations are people, my friend… of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets. Human beings my friend.” That speech by GOP candidate Mitt Romney stirred a huge debate about the role of corporations in the US society. The Occupy Wall Street movement highly distrusted firms. Were they exaggerating? Do companies need…
NEW YORK | It has been one of the main topics at Davos, according to The New York Times: A number of foreign officials complaining to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner about the Volcker rule. It hasn’t come from the usual suspects, American banks, but from other governments. European, Japanese and Canadian officials have objected to one aspect of this already polemic new regulation: the fact that it restricts US banks…
NEW YORK | It’s a catastrophe, experts say: about 1.2 million US students drop out every year and this imposes a huge cost on the whole economy. “Many of these schools [with high dropout rates] are in the inner-city and are made up of blacks and Latino students who are not graduating at great rates. This increases the level of poverty, it increases crime, it increases the incarceration rate. 80…
