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Below is a link to the Library of Congress (LOC) website and a few links to the Senate Banking Committee site which have the details on the ‘Economic Stabilization’ Bill which passed the Senate by a vote of 74-25.
The Bill, called H.R.1424 and sponsored by Patrick Kennedy, was first rejected by the House. But a [...]

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With the Economic Patriot Act past the Senate – including hundreds of billions in pork barrel – sweeteners, it’s time to focus in a little on politics. I’ll lead off the round-up there, trying to keep it fair despite my obvious anti-McCain-Palin bias.
Then we’ll turn to the usual fare of credit crisis news and [...]

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This has to be one of the most anticipated U.S. Vice Presidential debates in the last quarter century. It is as big as Bush – Ferraro and Gore – Quayle – Stockdale. I certainly will be watching.Partial as I am to Barack Obama, I was not anticipating Joe Biden as his running mate. [...]

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I try to report on these numbers as objectively as possible, but the drip-drip of negative news out of the U.S. starts to wear on you. Jobless claims were expected to drop substantially after the effects of Hurricane Ike wore off. I was expecting claims to fall from the near-500,000 level. They did [...]

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Below is an article I wrote that appears in this morning’s Guardian Newspaper in the UK. The crux of the article is that European politicians need to realise that their banks are not immune from the crisis that has hit the United States and that European banks are relatively under-capitalised.
The Europeans need to come [...]

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Nationwide released its monthly survey of U.K. house prices and the results are not promising. In September 2008, the month-to-month of 1.7% matched last month’s decline, but the annual change in Nationwide’s index fell 12.4%, the largest fall since at least 1991.
Nationwide’s Chef Economist Fionnuala Earley, always looking for a silver lining, had [...]

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Readers,
I have noticed recently that Google Reader has been taking an annoyingly long time to update some of my RSS feeds. NewsGator and Microsoft Outlook clients do not seem to have this problem. I have been trying to get a straight answer from Google as to what is happening, but am having little [...]

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The Senate has now passed the bailout bill Economic Patriot Act that the Bush Administration had a heavy hand in crafting. This bill, while better than nothing, is unlikely to alleviate for long the acute problems the financial markets are now suffering. Many ’sweeteners’ were added to make it likely to pass the [...]

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Hansruedi Ramsauer is one of the foremost German-language finance bloggers, writing over at the Swiss site Zeitenwende. In a recent post, he draws attention to the dire state of Swiss banking and calls on Swiss politicians to act now to secure the industry during this global credit crisis.
With UBS due to report earnings [...]

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The numbers on auto sales were unbelievably bad for September — Ford down 34%. Honda down 24%, Toyota down 32%, Nissan down 37%. Amazingly, G.M. was at the head of the pack with sales down only 16 percent. (I guess those Escalade Hybrids are selling like hot cakes).
Blame this one on the credit crunch [...]