March 2009

Lucky you, if you have a pension, but just how well is that little nest egg doing lately? If the worst happened and your company went belly-up, the insurance company that backs your pension fund would bail you out, right? Maybe, maybe not. Retirement funds of tens of millions of Americans were taken out of bonds and put into stocks. This was right before the stock market collapsed. This move ... read more

The bulls finished a March of madness nicely in the green after a choppy first quarter! In fact it was Wall Street's best month in years! TOP SHELF on Happy Hour: How we got this month-long rally is open for debate, but over the past month, the government has made some bold and controversial moves. They say, all intended to get this economy out of recession. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ... read more

So you're running behind on your payments and you get a phone call: $2500 they offer for help navigating foreclosure. Do you trust these companies that claim to have the answer for all your mortgage problems? Rand Mortgage Sales Director Drew Kessler joined me today in The Diamond District. ... read more

Stocks plunged today, though it was not unexpected. All 3 major indices are still on pace for a positive March, but it was still a very ugly day. TOP SHELF on Happy Hour: With $53 trillion in unfunded liabilities, an expected $9 trillion-dollar budget gap, hundreds of agencies and sprawling bureaucracy, the government looks a lot like General Motors on overdrive. The government has been ... read more

It’s the end of a wild week on Wall Street. We saw the fifth largest gain ever for the DOW, but finished the week lower. Let's take a look at the closing numbers... TOP SHELF on Happy Hour: President Obama and the CEO's of the nation's largest banks and other financial institutions try to patch things up. They're putting the finger pointing aside -- for now. Both sides realized they need ... read more

In today's Diamond District, we're talking about small businesses!!! Health care reform questions came up often during President Obama's online town hall meeting today, with the president assuring the audience "if you can't obtain it through a private plan, there's going to be a public plan... That's a principle." But struggling small businesses that are unable to afford fortune 500 benefits for ... read more

TOP SHELF on Happy Hour: Today will be remembered as an historic day in American finance and freedom. But depending on who you talk to, we took a giant leap forward from the abyss, or a giant leap backward. Treasury Secretary Geithner built off his momentum gained by Wall Street's warm reception to his public private bank plan, by laying out a vision for a tighter government grip on Wall ... read more

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Mexico today amid a widening drug war, spilling over our borders and into our cities. Clinton reportedly said today that we share the blame for Mexico's drug war. The New York Times agrees saying, "Mexico's economy (they say) is being dragged down by the recession to the north. American addicts have turned Mexico into a drug superhighway, and ... read more

A late surge helped stocks finish in positive territory today. TOP SHELF on Happy Hour: When will the anger fade and the recovery begin? When we stop getting headlines like this: IBM expected to announce another round of large-scale job cuts. Big Blue set to shift those jobs to India. Angry workers saying things like "low-paid Indian programmers get the jobs, American workers with tons of ... read more

President Obama's administration moving fast on the toxic debt polluting the nation's banks, most of which are complicated financial products created by the banks to make tons of money off the mortgage market, in turn fueling the housing bubble.  But is enough being done to fix housing itself, and not just the banks?   New York developer ... read more