Credit Card Report
Financial News Made Easy

What started as a fairly simple three-page proposal giving the Treasury Secretary unchecked power to orchestrate a bailout of the country’s financial system ended up as a complex rescue package, with enhanced congressional oversight, some added protections for taxpayers and a slap on the wrist to highly paid, underperforming executives.

In the short run, congressional leaders have achieved their goal of producing an agreement Sunday on a federal bailout of banks and other financial institutions holding bad mortgage debts before the world’s stock markets reopened.

Wall Street and the Bush administration’s record of financial oversight came under attack at the United Nations on Tuesday, with one world leader after another saying that market turmoil in the United States threatened the global economy.

The extraordinary nature of the outpouring on Tuesday was that it came from some of America’s closest allies and trading partners — not from those the United States would label political outcasts, but from mainstream countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Around 65% of domestic banks say they have tightened their lending standards for commercial and industrial loans to small firms over the past three months, according to the July 2008 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices.

Your credit score determines whether or not you qualify for a mortgage — and if so, how much it is going to cost you.

How is it that a mess concentrated in one part of the mortgage business — subprime loans — has frozen the credit markets, sent stock markets gyrating, caused the collapse of Bear Stearns, left the economy on the brink of the worst recession in a generation and forced the Federal Reserve to take its boldest action since the Depression?

Experts say the bleak U.S. economic forecast means it will take years for the dollar to recover its value and prestige.

The economy shed 63,000 jobs in February, the government said Friday, the fastest falloff in five years and the strongest evidence yet that the nation is headed toward — or may already be in — a recession. [video]

The U.S. dollar hit $1.51 to the euro for the first time on record, and fell to historic lows against a basket of currencies, as weak data suggest more interest rate cuts. [video]