Hey, hey, hey! It’s the weekend. I do hope you enjoy yours. International Developments ❖ “Syria shoots down Turkish warplane: sources”.  Next headline:  “Turkish warplane ‘missing’ near Syrian border”   New update: Bloomberg says Syria apologies. ❖ A grim-looking (or maybe he just always looks that way) Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said “Russia will not admit [...]

I’ve been expecting a lawsuit somewhere down the road related to the President’s recess appointments from late last year. At some point, either the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or the National Labor Relations Board were bound to issue a ruling that the subjects affected didn’t like, and they would resort to claiming that the recess [...]

A ruling in a long-awaited foreclosure case in Massachusetts had an ambiguous result today, though it’s presented here by Nick Timiraos as a win for banks: The highest court in Massachusetts rejected a challenge from a Boston homeowner who had contested the validity of her foreclosure in a widely watched case that threatened to create [...]

I mentioned earlier that the “Big 4″ leaders – of Germany, France, Italy and Spain – were meeting today in advance of a big EU summit next week. That meeting has adjourned, and the leaders announced they would push for a stimulus package of 130 billion euros. But even the initial reports of this shows [...]

Yesterday, data from TransUnion came out showing that the types of loan modifications favored during the foreclosure crisis, all of which fell short of principal reductions, provided only temporary relief and performed badly over time, with a very high re-default rate. So what about the flip side? What do we know about principal reductions and [...]

The big story of the day is a deeply reported piece by Tom Hamburger, showing that Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital in many ways invented the cottage industry of shipping US jobs overseas. During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies [...]

Jared Bernstein posted this amazing chart yesterday. It shows Federal Reserve forecasts for GDP growth in 2012. They have steadily fallen. In 2010, the Fed forecast an impressive 4% growth for 2012. By June of this year, they have lowered that to a little over 2%. And yet the Fed is also a policymaker, rather [...]

I’ve been tracking the two deadlines for Congress coming up in just over a week. If no action is taken, new federal student loans will see an interest rate of 6.8%, double the current 3.4%. And there will be no surface transportation bill, meaning that highway projects with federal participation will grind to a halt [...]

The ratings agency Moody’s reduced the credit ratings of 15 large banks yesterday, in an action that cast a poor light on both the banks and the ratings agencies, if that’s possible. First, here are the facts, and you’ll see that this was expected for some time: The credit agency, Moody’s Investors Service, which warned [...]

Here in California, the state Chamber of Commerce designates a certain number of bills as “job killers.” When Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor, he would routinely veto almost every bill with such a designation that made it through the legislature. One year he vetoed all of them. The situation hasn’t improved all that much with Jerry [...]

I’ve got the sense, from looking at how Germany has reacted to the crumbling Eurozone around them, that they were predisposed to not react until it got personal, until the depressed economy started affecting their own people. Germany made great economic strides by using the Eurozone to their benefit over the last 10 years, and [...]