Crash Survival Zone

More than six months have passed since Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and Wall Street teetered on the edge of oblivion, but the bad news from the world of business and finance keeps on rolling. If anything, it’s gotten worse. The financial mess still hasn’t been cleaned up; on March 23, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner presented [...]

In the early 1980s, around the time Ronald Reagan became President and Wall Street’s great modern bull market began, we started gambling (and winning!) and thinking magically. From 1980 to 2007, the median price of a new American home quadrupled. The Dow Jones industrial average climbed from 803 in the summer of 1982 to 14,165 [...]

How twentysomethings are coping with the recession.
Apprehension, with an enduring edge to it. That’s the general mood among the twentysomethings I’ve heard from during the last several weeks in response to a question I asked about how the recession is making them feel. The fear isn’t just about the present but about the long-term future. [...]

Unscientific assumptions in economic theory are undermining efforts to solve environmental problems.

The 19th-century creators of neoclassical economics—the theory that now serves as the basis for coordinating activities in the global market system—are credited with transforming their field into a scientific discipline. But what is not widely known is that these now legendary economists—William Stanley Jevons, [...]

The Federal Reserve must be careful about taking on credit risks as it broadens its new consumer lending program, even though a “pretty ugly” economic outlook warrants aggressive action, a top Fed official said on Thursday.

Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank President Charles Plosser told Reuters the U.S. central bank needs to expand its balance sheet to [...]

Tens of millions of Americans are enrolled in private employer-sponsored retirement plans — the great majority of them in 401(k) plans, which long ago replaced traditional pension benefits. These plans are easy to participate in with payroll deduction, and most people — once signed up — don’t spend much time thinking about the investments they’ve [...]

Billionaire investor George Soros said U.S. commercial real estate will probably drop at least 30 percent in value, causing further strains on banks.

“Commercial real estate has not yet fallen in value,” Soros, speaking at a forum in Washington, said. “It is inevitable, it is written, everybody knows it, there are already some transactions which reflect [...]

U.S. stocks will fall and the government will nationalize more banks as the economy contracts through the end of 2009, said Nouriel Roubini, the New York University professor who predicted last year’s economic crisis.

“The stock market is a bit ahead of the real macroeconomic and financial news,” Roubini, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of [...]

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Thursday called for broad reforms to curb risk taking on Wall Street, including a new regulator to oversee the entire financial system in a bid to restrain behavior that led to the worst credit crisis since the 1930s.

In testimony to Congress, Geithner said “comprehensive reform” was needed to guard against [...]

As Underlying Assets Drop, So Do Returns on Investments; Insurers Grow Leery of ‘Wraps’

Investors are pouring billions into stable-value funds — just as these popular retirement-plan investments are looking less stable than usual.

Stable-value funds, available only in 401(k)s and other tax-deferred savings plans, are designed to preserve capital and generate smooth, positive returns — hence [...]