NEW YORK | At 27 years old, Andrew Legrand doesn’t own a house nor a luxurious car. And yet he has over $100,000 in student debt. He graduated from law school in Florida last June but he still hasn’t started to pay off his bills. As he explains to The Corner, he feels anxious that the clock is running. “I didn’t have any debt prior to school. Now I owe $100k…
NEW YORK | IMF managing director Christine Lagarde has denied it. So have U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Spanish government: there is no plan or request for a Spanish bailout. However, stocks pared losses Thursday after the Dow Jones agency published a report that the IMF had started contingency plans on a possible rescue loan for Spain. The reporter quoted “people involved in the handling of the Spanish crisis”….
The International Air Transport Association published this week April data, which confirmed that there has been a certain slowdown on the overall still growth picture. From January to April, world air traffic was up by an accumulated 7.1 percent versus 7.4 percent in January to March. Emerging markets like Latin America, Middle East and Africa registered double-digit growth, while the down trend was worse in the US than in Europe.
NEW YORK | American homebuilders feel they are sort of turning the corner. On Tuesday the home price sector reported its most-improved selling season in a long time: according to the widely watched S&P/Case-Shiller index, home prices rose in March from February in most major U.S. cities for the first time in seven months. Lower borrowing costs and an improving job market also gave business a boost. Economists believe that…
NEW YORK | One of the current most visited exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is not dedicated to pop-art nor surrealistic sculpture but to mortgages. Foreclosed calls the home ownership American dream into question and shows how the suburban development has been not only environmentally aggressive in some states but financially unsound. “Many of the low-income people who bought at the height of the bubble…
NEW YORK | U.S. President clearly sided with pro-growth Europeans remarks in his final NATO summit remarks on Monday, urging the Old Continent to strenghten its defenses against financial market turmoil and recapitalize its banks. In a nutshell, these were his three darts. Yes to a monetary policy “We’ve got to make sure that there is a growth strategy to go alongside the need for fiscal discipline, as well as a monetary…
NEW YORK | There was a final statement, yet not a consensus about how to tackle the euro zone turmoil. Everyone in Camp David hoped that Greece will remain in the euro. For the first time, the argument that Europe cannot face more spending cuts gained widespread support. G8’s final communiqué showed a big push to German Chancellor Angela Merkel: it is urgent to bring deficits down through austerity measures…
LONDON | Investment company Threadneedle told clients that the market has increasingly moved its US economic forecasts towards more conservative views. Threadneedle explained in a technical note that, although it had updated its forecast for US economic growth in 2012 from 1.5% to 2% after some strong first quarter data, it too remained of the view that the US economy will slow in the second half of the year. Analysts said some…
Luis Arroyo, in Madrid | Greece was in free fall mode when at the European Central Bank they had the funny idea of pushing the country …downwards. The ECB said it had frozen all operations with Greek banks, which already are suffering a killing capital drain: “Central bank head George Provopoulos told Papoulias that Greeks have withdrawn as much as €700 million ($891 million) and the situation could worsen, according to the transcript…
NEW YORK | One of the biggest company stock market flotation on history is about to take place this Friday. With more than 900 million users around the world, Mark Zuckerberg’s company could be valued at $104 billion, that is more than Disney, Ford and Kraft Foods. The excitement grew as Zuckerberg announced that it would offer more shares to investors: 421 million, 25 percent more than it had previously planned…