High interest rates in the US are likely to continue for the next five years. This is the assessment of Jean Boivin, director of the BlackRock Investment Institute and former vice-president of the Bank of Canada, in an interview with the Financial Times at the end of last week. Between 2007 and 2023, the US debt quadrupled, from $8 trillion to $33 trillion.
The US economy grew a stellar 4.9% from July through September, driven by robust consumer spending despite the Federal Reserve's efforts to slow the economy with high-interest rates. Thursday's estimate from the Commerce Department showed that the nation's gross domestic product— the broadest gauge of the economy's total output of goods and services— was…
A rising share of American workers are making hardship withdrawals from their 401(k) accounts to cover emergency expenses.
Macroeconomics textbooks state that the effects of monetary policy have a lag of 18 months. It has now been more than 18 months since Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell announced the first rate hikes to contain inflation. But the U.S. economy is holding up much better than expected.
ST LOUIS– With the sentencing of ex-reality star Brittish Cierrah Williams for financial fraud, the IRS is urging the public to safeguard their Social Security. "The radar should be up if someone is saying,' Hey, I need your Social Security number,'" Special Agent Tom Murdock said. Williams pleaded guilty to 15 felonies, which included misusing Social Security…
U.S. household wealth ballooned at a record pace during the pandemic as the government doled out unprecedented aid, Americans hunkered down amid widespread lockdowns and stock and home values soared, according to a Federal Reserve survey. From 2019 to 2022, the median net worth of U.S. families surged 37% to $192,900, adjusted for inflation– the largest rise in…
Insurance giant Geico said it will lay off about 6% of its total workforce— or about 2,000 employees— as it makes some changes to the business and pushes for a return to the office for remote workers. Reports said an email to staff was received early on Thursday morning from the company's CEO Todd Combs. Geico was expected to fully implement the return to office…
The outlook for the U.S. economy shows it will remain stable or post a slower expansion, according to the Federal Reserve's survey of regional business contacts, known as the Beige Book. Federal Reserve bankers, who have raised interest rates by more than five percentage points since March 2022, have signaled they are inclined to keep monetary policy unchanged…
A hospital bed in the infirmary unit of Southern State Correctional Facility in December 2016. File photo by Phoebe Sheehan/VTDigger Incarcerated people have long been ineligible for Medicaid. When the federally funded health care program began in 1965, it expressly excluded “inmate(s) of a public institution” from coverage. In Vermont and other states, officials are now…
Mexico's insurance market has not yet recovered to pre-Covid-19 pandemic levels. We are talking about insurers such as Eduardo Silva's GNP; Metlife Mexico, led by Mario Valdes; AXA, led by Daniel Bandle; HDI, led by Ignacio Gonzalez; Mapfre, led by Jose Maria Romero; Allianz, headed by Bernd Valtingojer, and Chubb, managed by Diego Sosa, among others.
Mohammed El-Erian is one of the most respected economic sages in the business world, the holder of a prestigious academic post at Cambridge University and an advisory position at the international financial firm Allianz. El-Erian warned that the Federal Reserve's commitment to keeping interest rates high to quell inflation will sap the likelihood of a "…
NEW YORK— Former President Donald Trump has said he never thought his yearly financial statements "would be taken very seriously." A state lawyer showed letters that former Trump company controller Jeffrey McConney sent to a bank, saying he was providing copies of Trump's 2015 and 2016 financial statements as required under the conditions of a loan for his…
Prosecutors and the defense of Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the bankrupt FTX platform, clashed Wednesday in opening statements in the trial trying the businessman for alleged fraud and money laundering. The defense contends that he believed the risky private investment loans he made to Alameda Research, his investment arm, were permissible.
They say it takes a village to raise a child. Similarly, it takes a bent system to raise would could turn out to be one of America’s great fraudsters. It’s up to the jury to decide if FTX founder and former boss Sam Bankman-Fried is actually guilty of mass fraud and money laundering, rather than simply being a goofy, floppy-haired youngster in over his head. But it’s going to…
It’ s been 15 years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The investment firm’ s startling downfall marked the beginning of a historic Wall Street crash that swiftly wiped out over $7 trillion in home equity and $2.8 trillion in retirement portfolios. Wall Street hasn’ t fundamentally changed its behavior.
The president of the Minneapolis district of the Federal Reserve, Neel Kashkari, said on Wednesday 27 in an interview with CNN that there is a risk that US interest rates will need to rise further if the increases already implemented do not slow down the economy as expected. On the other hand, Kashkari pondered that a possible US government shutdown or extended…
The drug price policies of the federal Inflation Reduction Act were the subject of a Sept. 20 hearing of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives' Energy& Commerce Committee. The U.S. Centers for Medicare& Medicaid Services is staging "so-called negotiation… not a true negotiation," said subcommittee Chair Rep.
Attorney General Letitia James has asked New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron to decide partial liability based on what she describes as undeniable evidence that Trump and his company gave false values for assets to gain lending advantages. The lawsuit James filed a year ago seeks $250 million in financial penalties, plus strict limitations on the…
The benchmark interest rate in the United States is expected to remain unchanged. The expectation is taken for granted by the market, which sees the US Federal Reserve at the end of the cycle of rate hikes. Attention is turning to the timing of a cut, which will depend on the evolution of the US economy.
