Articles

The latest numbers show that personal income eeked out a slight gain in September, while spending continued to decline. The difference marks an increase in the nation's savings rate. This looks okay to me. People are still earning money, they just aren't spending all of it now.

As expected, the Fed dropped rates by 50 basis points (half a percent) to 1%. The idea is to make it cheaper for banks and borrowers to get money. The problem is that banks still don't want to lend and consumers don't have the cash to borrow.

GM's Rick Wagoner is turning to Chrysler, Toyota and the US government for support. The government should commit to giving support, but not in the form requested.

A mid-year report from the Bank of England analyzes the fall of the banking system and says that in the future banks must return to consumer deposits for funding. The report is an interesting overview of what has happened in the banking system.

Is now a good time to look at I Bonds? Some say yes, I say no. Here's why.

From Germany this morning, we can witness a trade that will be spoken about for years gone wrong.

The one bright spot of this entire mess is that we can now afford to travel to places in Europe and Asia that had become prohibitively expensive over the last two years.

This goes beyond absurd. Many of the investment banks that have required public money to stay afloat, and some that haven't stayed afloat, are still planning to pay out billions in bonuses. This is an outrage.

Alpha Bank and Trust was closed last Friday by the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was named receiver. This is the ninth bank failure in 2008.

The entire world wants to upgrade from a Nokia, a Motorola or a RIMM device to an IPhone.

There's a lot of bad news out there but there are also some positive things happening. A story that has gotten somewhat lost in the credit and banking crisis is the fact that the price of oil has collapsed. It was trading as high as $140/barrel last summer and today finished below $65/barrel.

There's another bank acquisition to report. PNC Corp. with the assistance of the TARP program, has purchased Ohio based National City. The combined bank will have a core deposit base of $180 billion, making PNC the fifth largest U.S. bank by deposits.

I'm not familiar with Peter Boockvar or his investing record but I thought it was interesting that analysts are not starting to talk about more drops in the markets. Before the talk was about whether we had hit a floor at 8,000.

We noticed today that Crestmark Bank is not taking new CD money which we thought was a little strange. So we called them and spoke with their Controller who says this is just normal business and all is fine.

Citibank is offering a competitive 6 month CD paying 4% APY.