Stock Market

Who's going to be the leader of the financial world in the role of Treasury Secretary under President Obama? It may be Democratic New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, who has pushed for an additional economic stimulus package to the tune of $300 billion to support infrastructure projects. CNBC's Carl Quintanilla asked Corzine outright on "Squawk Box" if he would accept a job in the Obama…

Perhaps this is coming a little late with the election already underway, but the idea the current economy is as threatened as it was during the Great Depression is unfounded, according to the Nov. 4 USA Today. "Failed banks. Panicked markets. Rising unemployment. For students of history, or people of a certain age, it all has an all-too-familiar ring. Is this another Great Depression? Not yet,"…

According to one UCLA economist, the U.S. is economically sound, but people have panicked because of "scary" warnings surrounding the $700 billion bailout. "Periods of crisis often beget bad policies," Lee E. Ohanian, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) said in an interview with Reason.tv. The professor stressed that six weeks ago the fundamentals of the economy…

Wall Street is definitely watching all those polls the networks keep touting. CNBC's Erin Burnett told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that Wall Street was predicting that Sen. Barack Obama will win the presidency, but an upset from Sen. John McCain might boost it: This market has priced in Obama, has not priced in McCain. Some people say that if McCain were to have an upset and win the market…

It's obvious The Washington Post's "Style" section is broadening it horizons beyond fashion, music, books and other fluff, plus of course - Howard Kurtz's media column and the comics. The editors of that section are tackling important events that changed history by commemorating them as milestones. The Post's Oct. 29 "Style" section allotted two-thirds of the front page to observing the 79th…

Sometimes former CEOs have a reason to be downbeat when they make predictions. Former Chairman and CEO of Citigroup Sanford Weill told CBS's "The Early Show" Oct. 28 that unemployment would hit 9 percent and that Wall Street CEOs "didn't deserve bonuses this year." It went something like this: Well, I think we've set in motion a whole series of events that is going to make the economy…

Sometimes government tries to fix the problem; then it makes the problem worse. In 2004, economists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), studied the policies of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and determined it actually prolonged the Depression by seven years. Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian blamed anti-free market measures for the slow recovery in an article…

Who wrote the following?:"Societies in which the few are allowed to fatten themselves without limit on the labor of many are not just."A. Friedrich EngelsB. William AyersC. Michelle ObamaD. Timothy RuttenAny of the answers would make sense, but the headline kind of gave it away. It was Timothy Rutten of the LA Times who penned that immortal line in his column of today.  In doing so, Rutten echoes…

Shades of McCain from an unlikely corner . . . When at the beginning of the current financial mess John McCain declared that "the fundamentals of the economy are strong," he was roundly lambasted by the MSM, while the Obama campaign called his statement "an enormous mistake."So, should we expect the liberal media and the Obama campaign to go after Barney Frank . . . now that he has said something…

You have to give credit where credit is due. The lead editorial in the Oct. 20 Washington Post didn't declare free-market capitalism dead after the failure of several financial institutions led to massive government intervention - as a front-page story on its Oct. 10 edition declared. Instead, the editorial pointed out the how the market that failed wasn't exactly free to begin with. "The…

When the Dow hit below 8,000, the media went nuts, crying the economy was on the brink of collapse. But a lot of that same economy is still doing quite well, despite the mainstream media. Businessman Dan Kennedy, a new columnist with the Business & Media Institute, shows how skewed the standard view really is. Between 91 and 94 percent of all home mortgages in the United States are current,…

The stock market is casting a vote of "no confidence" in Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and his Republican opponent is missing an opportunity to slam the freshman senator for an economic agenda that is a rehash of the worst of Presidents Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter.So argued on-air editor Charles Gasparino in an October 13 op-ed in the New York Post, where the CNBC talent mentioned that even Obama's…

Given that the topic of this post is the Associated Press, I guess I should be pleased to report that one of its two reports tonight about the dive in the stock market last week is correct. In one article ("Gov't eyes plan to take ownership stakes in banks"), AP's Harry Dunphy and Tom Raum correctly said that "the Dow Jones industrial average just completed its worst week ever, plummeting more…