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How will Marissa Mayer’s pregnancy play out? Will the new Yahoo chief executive find that it’s not so easy to power through a maternity leave? Or will she spend just a few short weeks at home — working all the while, as she promised in an interview — and thus set the bar high for future pregnant executives of Fortune 500 companies? What should the new “it” mom-to-be do?
If the Great Depression went down in history as the great equalizer (by razing the incomes of the wealthy), the Great Recession may be known for having the opposite effect. According to a new report issued by the Congressional Research Service, the share of wealth owned by the richest 1 percent of Americans grew from 2007 to 2010 to 34.5 percent. The only time, in the last two decades, when this group had a greater share of wealth was in 1995, when the World Wide Web was first commercializing.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Department of Education released a new report detailing the private student loan market. As the report states, private student loans mushroomed over the last decade, fueled by the very same forces that drove subprime mortgages through the roof: Wall Street’s seemingly endless appetite for new ways to make profit.
If you are aware of some of the specific derivatives and securities that are traded by banks and other financial services firms, you know that actual transactions in many of them occur infrequently. Prices based on what a willing buyer would pay a willing seller are difficult to come by. Let’s say you are a risk manager at one of these firms or perhaps a regulator curious about market exposures of a bank that you are tasked to monitor. How do you ascribe a value to a derivative or security if you cannot find a price in the market?
Despite near-record levels of economic inequality, many politicians and pundits still don't think this widening chasm is much of a problem in a country supposedly dedicated to egalitarian ideals.
Inequality, the logic goes, is a natural result of different degrees of work and creativity. Some people strive harder and have better ideas, as well as take more risks, and giving them outsized rewards is a good thing, since it encourages others to emulate this behavior and makes us all wealthier in the end.
For all the talk about the need for voter-identification laws, you’d think millions of Americans were impersonating dead people to get their candidates elected, or casting multiple ballots after breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
David Callahan posted a terrific blog yesterday that outlined HSBC’s outrageous behavior as catalogued in a 350-page report by the Senate’s Permanent Committee on Investigations.
Today we got a concrete sense of why, exactly, the banks fought so hard to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Because, among other things, this is an agency that can slap the banks with huge fines and force them to alter their business practices by legal fiat.
Without your consent, approval, or even awareness, large for-profit credit reporting companies know an awful lot about you. TransUnion, Experian, Equifax and their smaller competitors know the credit limit on your AmEx card, how much you still owe in student loans, and all about that time you made the car payment late. Now, for a change, we may get to learn a bit more about them.