Bernanke

Congress just put a $700 billion hot potato back on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s lap, and without the tool the Fed had sought to make its job easier: the ability to pay interest on bank reserves.
That could leave the Fed with little choice but to eventually lower interest rates again to keep the economy [...]

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 [...]

We have been here before with baby milk, pet food and Sudan Red (see more here). Not to mention the execution of the former head of the State Food and Drug Administration. But the current baby milk powder crisis shows that there is still a serious supply chain risk, and that companies need to proactively [...]

Wall Street Journal reporters Marcus Walker and Joellen Perry spoke with German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück about the financial crisis, its fallout in Europe, and calls for a pan-European solution. 

German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück, left, and Economics Minister Michael Glos take part in the weekly cabinet meeting in Berlin. (Reuters)

WSJ: What do you think of [...]

The luxury economy doesn’t rely on just a few investment banks. And even Manhattan has proven fairly resilient to the shocks on Wall Street in the past year.
But the fall of Lehman Brothers Holdings and the inevitable cuts at Merrill Lynch, which has agreed to be bought by Bank of America, could be the big [...]

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 [...]