I ripped into the Wall Street Journal last week in my blog. In a front-page article, it decried the “downside” of hospitals popping up all over the country at a time when our factories are slowly but surely disappearing.
“Inflation is back,” reports The Wall Street Journal.
But it’s complicated, says the paper, because today’s inflation is “coming at a time of sharply reduced interest rates in the US, the opposite of the usual response to rising inflaton.”
Consumer prices in the U.S., Europe and other rich countries are projected to rise 2.6% this year, the highest inflation rate since 1995, the International Monetary Fund said Wednesday.
Days after Bernanke pronounces the worst over, here comes another rescue package. Greenspan says, “It’s not my fault,” as if he hadn’t already made himself clear. Chris Mayer lays out his favorite “distressed” plays to BusinessWeek. Mainstream media picks up on our end-of-cheap-food theme.New commodity boom: Fast-food grease.
The Fed may have already begun its role as Wall Street ’supercop.’
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Fed has sent agents into major Wall Street investment banks to makes sure of the banks’ financial wellbeing.
“We want to be sure that any lending we do to the investment banks will be done on an appropriately sound basis,” said Fed chief Ben Bernanke.
The Fed has is lending money to investment banks, even though it currently has no statutory regulatory power over them.
Airbus Lands in Hot Water; Ford Fishtails in March; Microsoft Won’t Raise Yahoo Bid; SCA Sues Merrill Lynch; Big Oil Brought Before Congress; $10.9 Billion Blackstone Real Estate Fund; Gold Prices Sink; Indonesia’s Inflation Soars
With US stocks futures pointing higher and a rally around banks in London trading at the beginning of the new quarter, The Wall Street Journal sees light at the end of the credit-crisis tunnel.
“Stock futures rose as investors opened the books on a new quarter by betting that the latest write-downs from UBS and Deutsche Bank have put most of the worst damage to banks and brokers from the credit crisis out in the open,” says the WSJ.
Swiss bank UBS makes front-page news on The Wall Street Journal for its thumping quarterly loss of more than $12 billion on write-downs of $19 billion. The losses have claimed chairman Marc Ospel.
– USA 2008: The Great Depression
Brit newspaper The Independent leads with “dismal projections” that in the fiscal year starting in October, 28 million people in the US will rely on government food stamps to survive, the highest level since the food assistance programme was introduced in the 1960s.
Paulson plan will be “dead on arrival”, according to The New York Times, as “lawmakers and lobbyists from an array of industries” oppose to the plan to create a new financial regulatory system…
