Tucked in among the ambitious programs laid out in President Barack Obama's proposed 2010 budget yesterday was a welcome provision for employees of small businesses: the creation of an automatic Individual Retirement Account (IRA). As Obama pointed out in his budget proposal, some 75 million Americans—roughly half of all workers—lack any sort of employer-based retirement plan, such as a 401(k). And that group includes most employees of small businesses. MORE
Pat Regnier - Feb 27, 2009 2:36 PM ET
One salutary side effect of economic collapse: it gets people thinking. Or, rather, rethinking.
Case in point: "Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street," a fascinating story in Wired magazine that traces much of the blame for our current financial mess back to a highly abstruse mathematical formula, invented in 2000, that allowed Wall Streeters to easily model the complex risks of mortgage derivatives and other big messy investments.
Trouble MORE
Pat Regnier - Feb 27, 2009 9:45 AM ET
I have a lot of friends who ask me, usually with a hint of embarrassment, "Can you explain this whole credit/housing mess to me?" They read the headlines every day, but they're not totally sure what everything means. And can you blame them? It can be confusing even for those of us who write about this for a living. So when I came across the video below, produced by a MORE
Ismat Sarah Mangla - Feb 26, 2009 12:31 PM ET
What do you get when you have three economists watching a game of hoops?
You get a new paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which measures race relations on the basis of professional-basketball passing behavior.
In the paper, "Interracial Workplace Cooperation: Evidence from the NBA," a team of scholars from Brigham Young University examine six years' worth of statistics about completed shots on the basketball court and the assists MORE
George Mannes - Feb 26, 2009 11:30 AM ET
Hyundai Motor America seems to have tapped a nerve among nervous car buyers.
As Peter Valdes-Dapena reported this week on CNNMoney.com, the carmaker had a hugely successful January. The apparent reason? A new program that allows buyers to return their cars without financial penalty if they get laid off after they buy their Hyundai. While car sales plummeted 37% industry-wide from year-ago figures, Hyundai's sales were up more than 14% over MORE
George Mannes - Feb 26, 2009 8:00 AM ET
President Barack Obama may have made his address last night in the halls of Congress. But his speech was aimed at the American public. "I know that for many Americans watching right now, the state of economy is a concern that rises above all others, and rightly so," he said. "If you haven't been personally affected by this recession, you probably know someone who has: a friend, a neighbor, a MORE
Carolyn Bigda - Feb 25, 2009 12:41 PM ET
Everybody dance now! The recovery is on the way! The yield curve has turned positive once again!
The who has turned what?
Forgive me a moment while I go all wonky: The yield curve measures the relationship between short- and long-term interest rates. When it looks like smooth sailing on the horizon, the slope of the curve is positive: long-term bonds pay more than short-term ones as MORE
Pat Regnier - Feb 25, 2009 8:57 AM ET
by JEANNE FLEMING, PH.D. and LEONARD SCHWARZ
Question: My brother-in-law recently asked me to lend him $10,000 to tide him over till he finds a new job. He's offered me a second mortgage as security, but I doubt there's ten grand of equity left in his house, plus it's a trophy property they never really could afford. Still, I don't want my sister to lose her home. What should I do? MORE
kp - Feb 24, 2009 2:39 PM ET
Like any self-respecting value house, the Oakmark funds had a horrific 2008. The low-lights include: Oakmark International Small Cap Fund, -45.7%; Oakmark International, -41.1%: Oakmark Global, -38.8%: Oakmark Select, -36.2%.
Firm president John Raitt went for the glass half full/half empty spin, writing in Oakmark's most recent shareholder letter (dated Dec 31. 2008): "While all of our Funds performed better than the market averages for the year, we are still MORE
Pat Regnier - Feb 24, 2009 12:21 PM ET
John Maynard Keynes coined the phrase The Paradox of Thrift, an odd but accurate way to describe the situation many Americans find themselves in at the moment. The worse the economic times, the more people squirrel away their money. That sounds like a smart move if you've lost your job or you're retired and your nest egg has shriveled. Even if you're lucky enough to still have a job, you're MORE
Donna Rosato - Feb 23, 2009 6:59 PM ET
About one minute into any conversation with an academic or policy-type who studies the issue of retirement security these days you hear some version of this lament:
"It's not that the 401(k) has failed, it's that the 401(k) was never meant to be the primary retirement fund for Americans. It is being asked to do something it was never intended to do."
Great. Now they tell us.
The problem, as the retirement MORE
Pat Regnier - Feb 23, 2009 9:45 AM ET
Sometimes good things come disguised as minor rule changes. And for retirees, that's certainly true this year. In recent months senior citizens received two relatively small breaks designed to improve their retirement incomes—the suspension of required minimum distributions (RMDs) for IRA and 401(k) accounts for 2009, as well as a 5.8% cost of living adjustment (COLA) in Social Security payments. Nice, but no big deal, right? Actually, those changes MORE
Pat Regnier - Feb 20, 2009 12:23 PM ET
Everyone who watches CNBC on a regular basis knows that Rick Santelli -- the network's excitable boy at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange -- is a voluble sort, not quite Jim-Cramer-crazy, but a screamer, with opinions as big as his oversized lungs. But Santelli really outdid himself yesterday morning with a market report that turned into the strangest populist rant since -- well, possibly ever. His target? Not the malefactors of MORE
Pat Regnier - Feb 20, 2009 10:45 AM ET
Argue all you want about the job-creating powers of the stimulus bill over the long haul, but take note that it contains a major benefit for many laid-off workers right now.
Inside the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, signed into law Tuesday, is a temporary 65% subsidy toward group health insurance premiums for laid-off employees and their families.
Although this does little to mend America's health-insurance safety net, it's still MORE
George Mannes - Feb 19, 2009 3:22 PM ET
Among the casualties in the Washington deal-making to get the economic stimulus package passed was substantive assistance for all families with college-bound students. An early proposal to boost the loan limit for unsubsidized federal Stafford loans by $2,000 per year—a loan available to all comers regardless of family income- failed to make the final cut. (The just-signed legislation does indeed provide more college aid for low-and moderate income families through MORE
Pat Regnier - Feb 19, 2009 10:55 AM ET
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