Articles About Wall Street

Compensation czar Kenneth Feinberg – officially, the Obama administration’s special master for executive compensation – believes that the pay reductions he mandated at seven taxpayer-rescued firms should become the model  for Wall Street and corporate America. “There is entirely too much reliance on cash and there’s got to be a better way to tie corporate […]

The $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) cost $200 billion less than originally anticipated,  according to a new Treasury Department report.  That reflects faster repayments by big banks, as well as less spending on rescue programs as the financial sector recovers more quickly than expected. And it’s good news for President Obama’s new job […]

As well-known national retailers like Circuit City and Linens ‘n’ Things go out of business, one high-profile merchant saw its profits fall just one percent during the third quarter of 2009.  Venerable Tiffany & Co. — renowned for its signature blue box – recently raised its year-end forecasts after reporting an uptick in domestic and […]

When President Bill Clinton signed legislation to repeal the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, he handed Wall Street  a victory that likely contributed to the recent financial meltdown. Glass-Steagall’s repeal eliminated barriers between normal banking activities – deposits and lending – and riskier areas such as derivatives trading. “The capital-market rules are going to change,” […]

There’s a rather odd correlation between the New York Yankees winning the World Series and Wall Street.   A Yankee win historically has coincided with a bull market.  An analysis by Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ reveals an average of double-digit yearly returns from stocks when the Yankees win the World Series.  By contrast, the stock […]

On the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of the global financial crisis,  President Barack Obama used a Wall Street speech to call for stringent new regulation of United States markets.  After Lehman’s collapse, the American government infused billions of dollars into the financial system and took major stakes in […]

Federal Reserve chairman and Great Depression scholar Ben Bernanke will stay in his job for another four years if President Barack Obama gets his way.  There likely will be some contentious moments during the reconfirmation hearings as Senators grill him about bailing out Wall Street institutions deemed too big to fail.  He is expected to […]

The Wells Fargo wagon delivered good news to Wall Street when the San Francisco-based bank announced a record first-quarter profit of approximately $3 billion, or 55 percent per common share.  Contrast these numbers with the fourth quarter of 2008, when Wells Fargo reported a $2.6 billion loss. The news sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average […]

Paulson’s TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) turnaround – he originally dismissed the bailout package as a recipe for “failure” -may demonstrate that his revised response is a gesture to public opinion.  At present, the bailout also seems geared more to help Main Street than Wall Street, a strategy that will play well with the general […]

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is sitting on $350 billion dollars of the taxpayers’ money, and can’t quite settle on the best way to spend it.  When approved by Congress in October, the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) bill’s purpose was to purchase bad mortgage assets that had frozen the credit markets. The Treasury Department […]