For those who haven’t seen it, this video is a fantastic explanation of how the credit crisis formed.
Using language that a lay person can understand and fantastic animated graphics, the video explains the link between homeowners, mortgage brokers and lenders, Wall St, institutional investors, ratings agencies, CDOs and CDSs.
It shows at what point greed overtook the bankers and how the whole system came crashing down.
State television in Turkmenistan says the president has fired the head of the state natural gas monopoly
in yet another shake-up of the Central Asian country’s burgeoning energy industry.
State television reported Sunday that Turkmengaz chairman Nury Mukhammedov was dismissed by presidential decree “for serious shortcomings in his work.”
Top managers in state energy companies are frequently reshuffled,
Iceland’s former Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde,
the first government leader to be indicted for economic mismanagement during the financial crisis,
said he is the victim of political revenge and blamed the island’s banks for the collapse.
Haarde called the charges “absurd” and predicted he will be “vindicated at the end of the day,” in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Mark Crumpton.
While the pause in foreclosures due to blatant irregularities in paperwork by banks
may put at least a temporary slowing in the dynamic of families evicted from their homes,
the human impact on those that have already taken been thrown out of their residences has been brutal indeed.
For a few hours at the mall this summer, Nick Griffith, his wife, Lacey Lennon, and their two young children got to feel like a regular family again.
As health care costs continue their relentless climb, companies are increasingly passing on higher premium costs to workers.
In contrast to past practices of absorbing higher prices, some companies chose this year to keep their costs the same
by passing the entire increase in premiums for family coverage onto their workers,
according to a survey released by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit research group.
We’ve noted how crucial China is to the current export success of Germany, and hence its current economic strength.
But the strength of the Japanese yen is also playing a role in keeping the German export machine humming,
since the two countries tend to compete directly in many sectors,
Having passed Germany (exports), Japan (gross domestic product) and the United States (auto sales) over the past year,
China is now poised to lead the world in yet another category: patent application filings.
A new study released this week by Thomson Reuters says that by 2011 China will likely pass the United States and Japan in new patent applications.
Proposals for the first large solar power plants ever built on Federal lands won final approval from Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.
The Interior Department’s action was delayed by the need for multiple approvals from agencies ranging from the Secret Service to the General Services Administration, officials said.
Both plants are to rise in the California desert under a fast-track program
Last month, Chile marked the bicentennial of its independence with pride in how far it has come in 200 years, but with a shadow over the celebration.
Unforgotten were 33 miners who have been trapped a half-mile underground by a shaft collapse for almost two months.
Copper mining has always helped to define Chile, and the country has united in its determination to save these men.
Longtime Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov was fired on Sept. 28 by Russian President Dmitri Medvedev after an 18-year tenure as the mayor of Russia’s capital. The presidential decree firing Luzhkov cited Medvedev’s “loss of trust” in the mayor as the reason for the dismissal, words usually reserved by the Russian government for the most egregious offenses.
