It is not all that long ago that the big credit crunch banks were being lambasted in some quarters for their plans to invest heavily in Chinese banks, and that at least one pundit was predicting “The Coming Collapse of China”. How things change! Now it is the titans of Wall Street and the City [...]

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson released the following statement after Congress’s passage of the financial rescue package.
By acting this week, Congress has proven that our Nation’s leaders are capable of coming together at a time of crisis, even at a critical stage of the political calendar, to do what is necessary to stabilize our financial system [...]

New Federal Reserve initiatives aimed at short-term funding markets should help ease the liquidity shock now being faced by financial markets, and improve that sector’s prospects, a central bank official said Thursday.
“Our hope is that the new liquidity facilities will make it easier for commercial paper to serve its important purposes and for financing to [...]

This month’s stat wrap core comes courtesy of Caijing Magazine, which informs us in its newsletter that:
• “China’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew 10.4 percent to top 13 trillion yuan during the first half of the year (according to National Bureau of Statistics)…was down 1.8 percentage points from the same period last year.
• “The consumer [...]

In a critical post about a new search engine awkwardly-named Cuil, the folks at popular blog TechCrunch posted a screen grab of a Cuil search for “TechCrunch” and said: “And I have no idea who that person is next to the results for our ‘About’ section.” Why it is none other than Shanghai’s biggest R.E.M. [...]

A roundup of economic news from around the Web.
Employment Numbers: Barry Ritholtz on his Big Picture blog again takes issue with the way the government calculates the employment data, this time taking aim at bankruptcies and the birth/death model. “One would think that something titled Birth/Death might actually look at business deaths, aka bankruptcies, partnership [...]

The Federal Reserve’s decision today to extend loans to investment banks into 2009 is one more hurdle to an eventual tightening cycle that now appears unlikely to begin before next year.
It’s not an insurmountable one, Fed watchers said, especially if inflation were to worsen further. But like the November elections, it’s the type of symbolic [...]