Personal Finance

MSNBC has been covering President Obama’s White House Summit on Working Families intently thus far today, and the trend continued on the June 23 edition of Andrea Mitchell Reports. Guest host Peter Alexander brought on Charmaine Givens-Thomas to discuss her efforts in petitioning President Obama to set up a meeting with Wal-Mart workers to highlight low wages, inequality, and the lack of…

Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich made a very curious statement on Monday’s Morning Joe. During a roundtable discussion on income inequality, former congressman Harold Ford Jr. (D-Tenn.) asked Reich what policies, besides raising the minimum wage, the government should employ in order to improve economic mobility and increase middle class purchasing power. [Video below. MP3 audio here…

Associated Press stories today on the quarterly earnings releases of Wells Fargo (unbylined) and JPMorgan Chase (by Steve Rothwell) essentially mocked the nearly continuous monthly stream of reports the wire service's economics writers, particularly Martin Crutsinger and Chris Rugaber, have generated about the "housing recovery" during at least the past year. The Wells Fargo story disclosed…

On CNN’s State of the Union Sunday, host Candy Crowley asked a question of Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wisc.) that should offend people on both sides of the aisle. “If I am an unemployed American…or if I am a minimum wage worker…why would I become a Republican?” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In an earlier post today (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I noted that reporters at Politico and CNNMoney.com seemed mystified at a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll showing that 68 percent of Americans believe the economy is in poor shape, and that over half believe it will still be that way a year from now. One reason for their incredulity is that, perhaps deliberately, they haven't been…

ABC This Week viewers were treated to a classic conservative versus liberal debate Sunday. When former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich tried to blame the increase in poverty in the past five years on Republicans, former Speaker of the House and current CNN host Newt Gingrich called it "baloney" firing back, "Every major city which is a center of poverty is run by Democrats" (video…

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan made some rather ominous economic observations Sunday. Appearing on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, Greenspan said, “[T]he level of uncertainty about the very long-term future is far greater than at any time I particularly remember.” He blamed it on “government intervention [that] has been so horrendous that businesses cannot basically decide what to…

On October 3, the National Retail Federation projected that "sales in the months of November and December" will "marginally increase 3.9 percent to $602.1 billion, over 2012’s actual 3.5 percent holiday season sales growth." But on October 16, it warned that "the average holiday shopper will spend $737.95 on gifts, décor, greeting cards and more, two percent less than the $752.24 they actually…

You would think that economic forecasters, who have been obsessing over the impact on economic growth of October's 17 percent partial government shutdown might have noticed that a lot of people have all of a sudden learned that they're about to experience a major cut in their take-home pay. You would be wrong. Hundreds of thousands of Americans had received health insurance cancellation…

Kathleen Pender at the San Francisco Chronicle (HT Zombie at PJ Media) had some Obamacare-related financial advice for her readers on Saturday: "Consider reducing your 2014 income by working just a bit less," because doing so could get you a "huge health care subsidy." This is not news to anyone who has studied Obamacare in detail, and shouldn't be a revelation to anyone in the business press…

PBS's Tavis Smiley made a comment Thursday that every African-American as well as liberal media member should sit up and take notice. Appearing on Fox News's Hannity, Smiley said, "The data is going to indicate sadly that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

It's almost amusing to watch writers like Christopher Rugaber at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, pretend not to understand why the economy isn't growing as much as one would "expect" based on the number of jobs being added each month and falling weekly unemployment claims. In a Thursday story which was mostly worthless because the incompletely collected government data…

Potentially the most dishonest aspect of the Obama-loving media's reporting since January 20, 2009, pertains to how they've almost totally ignored how poorly the economy is performing. On Tuesday, Michael T. Snyder, author of the gloom and doom book "The Beginning of the End," wrote a fabulous piece titled "33 Shocking Facts Which Show How Badly The Economy Has Tanked Since Obama Became…

MSNBC has apparently realized that Americans are not concerned about the sequester, so the Lean Forward network has made another attempt to convince us how terrible it really is. In an article published Monday on msnbc.com, writer Timothy Noah sent readers a grim message that was summed up in the article’s title: “The Sequester Isn’t Hurting You? Think Again.” Noah struck a strikingly…