Central banks risk driving the global economy into a “devastating” recession next year if they raise interest rates too much too quickly, the World Bank has warned. “Central banks around the world have been raising interest rates with a degree of synchronicity not seen over the past five decades, a trend likely to continue well...
Dragflation: Economic growth declining and inflation rising… plus the pressure of interest rate hikes that are drying up the cheap money pool are causing companies in many sectors to lay off employees. To illustrate the employment trends and the socioeconomic implications, each week we will list job losses: GAP cutting 500 corporate positions Checkout.com will...
Roughly one in four politicians serving in Congress (or their immediate family members) have traded individual stocks over the past several years. And nearly one-fifth—97 lawmakers—bought or sold assets in sectors that coincided with their legislative committee assignments and work. Partly by using data from the trade monitoring platform Unusual Whales, The New York Times...
In September 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that Robert Kaplan, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, made several million-dollar stock trades in 2020 while he had inside information about the Fed’s plans to bolster the U.S. economy and financial system as the COVID War began. The same month, Kaplan resigned from the...
Last week was the week that NBC News and The New York Times Co. had told workers to return to their central offices, at least part-time. Employees of the two companies’ digital divisions have not complied. The union representing Times workers said on 11 September that it had collected 1,280 signed pledges from those employees...
Although the U.S. economy has restored the full number of jobs lost during the COVID-era shutdown, New York City is still 176,000 jobs smaller than it was in 2019, making it the slowest to recover among major U.S. cities, The New York Times reported. City and state lockdown mandates cost New York a million jobs...
As U.S. gasoline prices fall, electricity prices are on the rise, climbing 15.8 percent year on year in August, the biggest 12-month leap since 1980, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Some electric utilities have literally doubled their electricity prices to consumers this year after winning permission from their public utilities commissions to...
In the week ending 15 September, the average national interest rate on a fixed-rate, 30-year home mortgage was 6.02 percent, according to the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac). The rate rose from 5.89 percent the previous week and is more than double the 2.86 percent average a year ago. Rates began this year...
Six in 10 Americans are unable to pay off their credit card balances for at least a year, compared to five out of 10 a year ago, a CreditCards.com survey found. The proportion of cardholders in debt for at least two years has risen from 32 percent in 2021 to 40 percent now, the survey...
U.S. bank deposits shrank by $370 billion in this year’s second quarter, falling from $19.93 trillion to $19.56 trillion, a record quarterly fall-off and the first decline since 2018, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Bank accounts swelled by $5 trillion in 2020 and 2021 as the federal government sent a series of stimulus...