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Wall Street Plays Hardball

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Business Week - By Theo Francis - Nov. 24 (Special Report) - Across the nation, local governments and related public entities, already reeling from the recession, face another fiscal crisis: billions of dollars in fees owed to UBS, Goldman Sachs (GS), and other financial giants on investment deals gone wrong.

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Blacks hit hard by economy's punch

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By V. Dion Haynes - Nov. 24 (News Report) - Joblessness for 16-to-24-year-old black men has reached Great Depression proportions -- 34.5 percent in October, more than three times the rate for the general U.S. population. And last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that unemployment

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Scenes from Iowa's recession

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Des Moines Register - By Michael Bugeja - Nov. 23 (Special Report) - They arrive at Gray's Lake Park in the morning, basking on borrowed time of a mild mid-November, realizing the winter can arrive any day like layoffs without warning. They are the unemployed, strolling with friends, partners or retirees, or sometimes alone. Everyone has a story to tell. Everyone knows someone else out of work in what some call "The Second Depression." They are neighbors, acquaintances, family members, colleagues, friends. They may be you. They belong to "The New Poverty," people who followed the rules, paid bills and mortgages on time and whose lives were scuttled by Ponzi and subprime schemes happening far away.

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Fed under fire as public anger mounts

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Associated Press - By Tom Raum - Nov. 23 (News Analysis) - Suddenly the Federal Reserve is everybody's punching bag. Strip the Fed of its bank regulation powers, some in Congress are demanding. Get probing audits of its behind-the-scenes operations, others say. The chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is always fair game for criticism and second-guessing, usually over interest rate actions. But this year the criticism is much broader as Congress responds to widespread public anger that the Fed bailed out Wall Street but not ordinary Americans, and with unemployment in double digits.

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The Cost of Dying

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

CBS News - By Steve Kroft - Nov. 23 (Special Report) - Every medical study ever conducted has concluded that 100 percent of all Americans will eventually die. This comes as no great surprise, but the amount of money being spent at the very end of people's lives probably will. Last year, Medicare paid $50 billion just for doctor and hospital bills during the last two months of patients' lives - that's more than the budget of the Department of Homeland Security or the Department of Education. And it has been estimated that 20 to 30 percent of these medical expenditures may have had no meaningful impact. Most of the bills are paid for by the federal government with few or no questions asked. You might think this would be an obvious thing for Congress and the president to address as they try to reform health care. But what used to be a bipartisan issue has become a politically explosive one - a perfect example of the costs that threaten to bankrupt the country and how hard it's going to be to rein them in

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Weighing Jobs and Deficit

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By Elizabeth Williamson - Nov. 23 (News Report) - The White House is lukewarm about proposals by congressional Democrats to introduce broad legislation to create jobs, instead favoring targeted measures that would be less likely to inflate the deficit, administration officials said. There is as yet no agreement within the White House or in Congress on how to try to curb the U.S. jobless rate. But the differences in opinion suggest that rifts could emerge among Democrats as they wrestle with how to beat back the highest unemployment rate in a generation.

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