EconomicCrisis.US

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said on Monday that the economic crisis showed that the American financial system had failed a major test and was in need of an overhaul.

Speaking at a conference in Washington, Mr. Geithner said that the Obama administration planned to work with Congress to develop a modernized government regulatory structure for financial institutions.

He said it was a “terrible, tragic thing” that the government did not have better tools, such as the power to take over major firms, when the credit crisis accelerated last fall.
Read the rest of this entry »

U.S. regulators and law enforcement officials said on Friday they are aggressively cracking down on fraud related to the financial crisis and are seeking more powers to prevent predatory lending in the future.

The FBI said it has 43 corporate fraud cases under way directly related to the financial crisis, and said they include allegations of financial statement manipulation, accounting fraud and insider trading.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission told lawmakers at a House Financial Services Committee hearing that it has several investigations into subprime lenders that raise issues regarding possible insider trading, particularly before the announcement of negative news regarding the lender.
Read the rest of this entry »

In years past, a financial rite of passage for college students and young adults was to apply for a credit card and start to build a credit history. But in today’s rocky economy, those who seek credit for the first time are forced to think more creatively as lenders are becoming less liberal with issuing credit to riskier applicants.

“Right now, there is a lot going on in the credit card industry,” says Tanisha Warner, spokeswoman for Houston-based Consumer Credit Counseling Services. “Establishing a good credit history is important, but it is important for people to understand that things are different now and it might be a little harder to get traditional credit so they’ll have to go to explore some nontraditional routes.”
Read the rest of this entry »

The world’s economic crisis has cost more men their jobs than women in Western countries, the International Labor Organization (ILO) said on Thursday.

The male jobless rate in developed economies rose 1.1 percentage points to 6.6 percent in 2008, the year when credit, financial, and economic woes began to sink global markets, the U.N. agency said in a report. Female unemployment rose 0.8 percentage points to 6.8 percent.

“There was a reduction in the gender gap in the unemployment rate in 2008 but only because the situation of men in the labor market worsened more than the situation of women,” the ILO said in its Global Employment Trends for Women study.
Read the rest of this entry »