economics

by Alan Farago

A small percentage of Americans ever heard of the peloton; the tight-knit pack of riders leading a bicycle race. But Americans generally are clueless about so much of what the rest of our trading partners understand: the United States has dropped to the back of the world economic peloton.

Willamette Week is running a story that discusses the failure of Oregon's Senate Democratic leaders to provide relief to more than 15,000 Oregonians who will soon have adjustable rate mortgages reset to a higher interest rate.

by Mike Whitney

On January 14, 2008 the FDIC web site began posting the rules for reimbursing depositors in the event of a bank failure. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is required to “determine the total insured amount for each depositor.....as of the day of the failure” and return their money as quickly as possible. The agency is “modernizing its current business processes and procedures for determining deposit insurance coverage in the event of a failure of one of the largest insured depository institutions.”

by Chalmers Johnson
published by Tom Dispatch

The military adventurers of the Bush administration have much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups of men thought that they were the “smartest guys in the room,” the title of Alex Gibney’s prize-winning film on what went wrong at Enron. The neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.

Martin Luther King Day was one of the worst days of global trading in world history.

US markets were given a brief reprieve thanks to the holiday, but the Dow Jones, is down 263 points in the first hour of trading on Tuesday.

The Federal Reserve responded to weak futures for US companies and massive losses in European and Asian markets by cutting interest rates on Monday.

by Danny Schecter

The new word of the week is “economic stimulus package.” Everyone is for it.

The President wants it if only because he knows a worsening economic crisis will leave his Administration in deep doo-doo, the way it did his dad’s back in ‘92. Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, is all for it if only because all of his rate cuts and “injections” of money into the financial system have not turned the US economy around.

The price of imports from China has risen at a 4 percent rate over the last quarter.

By Dean Baker