Four years after the onset of the financial crisis — in March 2008 Bear Stearns was rescued from failure — we still lack a clear understanding of the underlying causes. Hundreds of studies and books have given us an increasingly detailed picture of what happened without conclusively answering why. Conventional wisdom has advanced competing theories: Wall Street types took too many risks, encouraged by lax government regulation; or pro-homeownership policies eroded mortgage-lending standards and created the housing bubble.
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Long-term understanding of the U.S. economic crisis
March - 19 - 2012
Doomsayers see economic crisis ahead
February - 28 - 2012
Behind the mainstream Wall Street happy talk about more stable financial markets and an improving economy are grim warnings of tough times ahead from a small cadre of doomsayers who warn that the worst of the financial crisis is still to come.
Harry Dent, author of the new book The Great Crash Ahead, says another stock market crash is coming due to a bad ending to the global debt bubble. He has pulled back on his earlier prediction of a crash in 2012, as central banks around the world have been flooding markets with money, giving stocks an artificial short-term boost. But a crash is coming in 2013 or 2014, he warns. “This will be a repeat of 2008-09, only bigger, when it finally hits,” Dent told USA TODAY.
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Krueger named top US economic adviser
August - 30 - 2011
US President Barack Obama nominated Alan Krueger, a Princeton University expert on unemployment, as his top economic adviser as he plots an “urgent” new offensive on the jobs crisis.
Obama described Krueger as one of America’s top economists who understood the challenges that country faces, with a recovery that has been too tepid to to make significant cuts in an unemployment rate of 9.1 per cent.
Krueger, if confirmed by the Senate, will serve as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and succeed long-time Obama confidante Austan Goolsbee who left the administration to return to academia in Chicago.
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US jobless claims at 4-month low
August - 11 - 2011
The number of Americans claiming new jobless benefits fell to a four-month low last week, a sliver of hope for an economy battered for days by a credit rating downgrade and falling share prices.
The jobless claims data released by the Labor Department on Thursday eased concerns that the economy was heading back into recession as feared by investors, and buoyed U.S. stocks.
Initial claims for state unemployment benefits fell 7,000 to a seasonally adjusted 395,000, the Labor Department said, the lowest level since early April. Economists had expected a reading of 400,000.
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