As much as $700 million in federal aid intended to fortify homes after the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005 have been either squandered or misspent, said the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on Wednesday, who claimed that likelihood of recovering the money was “slim, at best.”
The Federal Reserve on Wednesday said it would keep its stimulus policies in place until it is convinced that recent gains and improvements in the economy can be sustained organically without assistance from policymakers.
In a statement after a two-day meeting, the Fed said it would leave the pace of asset purchases unchanged at $85 billion a month, until it sees signs of a long-term improvement in unemployment levels.
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service is urging nearly 1 million Americans to file their federal tax returns for 2009 by April 15 or risk losing out on $917 million in unclaimed tax refunds, reported the Associated Press on Friday, with about half of the potential refunds larger than $500, estimated the agency.
They may be small in number, but immigrants are leading the way in business startups and attaining degrees in highly lucrative fields, such as science and mathematics, driving the entrepreneurial and economic change America.
Recent immigrants and their children are a growing component of the United States population, making up almost 13 percent of the country. As their numbers grow in size, immigrants themselves take various paths toward socioeconomic advancement, including opening new businesses or working in particularly lucrative niche industries.
A major cyberattack on the United States could cripple the country’s infrastructure and economy, warned a top spy agency, posing the most dangerous immediate threat to U.S. national security.
In his annual assessment of security threats, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the top national security threats are now in the cyber arena, ahead of global terrorist networks.
Republicans are set to unveil a conservative budget on Tuesday that would slash government spending by $4.6 trillion over a decade and balance the budget by 2023 without any new taxes.
On Tuesday, Paul Ryan, chairman of the House budget committee and former Republican vice-presidential nominee, will for the third consecutive year present a conservative fiscal package that will require only “modest policy changes” to balance the federal budget in 10 years.
U.S. banks have enough capital to withstand a severe economic downturn, the Federal Reserve said on Thursday, announcing that 17 out of 18 major banks had passed its annual stress test.
A stronger economy and banks’ efforts to boost their capital since the 2007-2009 U.S. financial crises helped all but one of the country’s 18 largest banks meet the minimum hurdle of a 5 percent capital buffer in the Fed’s annual “stress test.”
Broad U.S. “sequester” spending cuts that take effect beginning Friday will hurt growth in the world’s largest economy and destabilise a fragile global economic recovery, the International Monetary Fund said on Thursday, warning that the U.S.’s biggest trading partners would be hardest hit.
The IMF added that it will likely trim its growth forecast for the United States and the global economy if the $85 billion in automatic spending cuts, also known as sequestration, take effect on Friday.
U.S. banks posted their 12th straight quarterly profit in the last three months of 2012, a 37 percent increase from a year ago, reaching their highest level in six years as banks continued to expand lending.
U.S banks earned $34.7 billion in the last three months of 2012, up from $25.4 billion a year ago and the highest for a fourth quarter since 2006, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation revealed on Tuesday.
Americans under the age of 35 are taking on less debt obligations than before the financial crisis, showed a study by the Pew Research Center on Friday, highlighting the efforts taken by young adults to curb spending amid one of the longest recessions in U.S. history.
