Archive for the ‘Financial News’ Category

Cut spending, increase taxes. Pay more, get less. Awesome. For Britain.

Britain’s structural deficit should be eliminated in five years by cutting public spending and raising taxes, finance minister George Osborne said Tuesday in the new government’s first budget.

“We are on track to have debt falling and a balanced structural currentbudget by the end of this parliament” in 2014-15, said Osborne, who is a key member of Britain’s Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.

The Conservative Party had made a key election pledge to eliminate the bulk of the structural deficit within five years.

Are they kidding? The oil spill occurred because someone screwed up. There, I just saved our government MILLIONS of dollars.

U.S. President Barack Obama will create a presidential commission to investigate the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and study industry practices and the role of government oversight, an administration official said on Monday.

The panel, which the president will establish with an executive order, will be similar to those created to look into the 1986 space shuttle Challenger explosion and the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979, the official said.

Yeah, and we got truthful, honest answers from those investigations as well, didn’t we?

Median prices have risen, but people still can’t afford the houses because they can’t find work.

Keep moving forward.

Home prices rose in nearly 60 percent of U.S. cities in the first quarter of this year, as the housing market started to stabilize thanks to billions of dollars in federal spending.

The median sales price for previously occupied homes rose in 91 out of 152 metropolitan areas tracked in the January-March quarter versus a year ago, the National Association of Realtors said Tuesday.

Sex.com, often touted as one of the most valuable Internet domain names, is due to head to the auction block next week.

DOM Partners LLC, a New Jersey lender that backed a 2006 purchase of the domain name for a reported $14 million, is foreclosing on the Internet property, and is due to auction it on March 18 at New York law firm Windels Marx Lane & Mittendorf LLP, according to legal notices.

Bidding for the Internet property, the tumultuous past of which includes several lawsuits and two books, is due to start at $1 million.

Face it, sex sells but it doesn’t always pay the bills.

Wasn’t it nice of our government to “allow” some banks to pay back money. We wouldn’t want to see rampant abuse of that permission would we?

U.S. officials on Tuesday gave 10 of the nation’s biggest banks approval to pay back a combined $68 billion of taxpayer money pumped into them to combat the credit crisis.

The Treasury Department did not name the banks but many of them are likely to announce they are making repayments and their names eventually will be published in routine Treasury reports.

This translates into “You are allowed to pay back the money that most of you were forced to take in the first place.”

When you make a deal with the devil, there’s always a price to pay.

PMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) and American Express Co (AXP.N) on Monday announced plans to sell $5.5 billion of common stock, hoping to position themselves to quickly repay funds from the government’s bank bailout plan.

JPMorgan will sell $5 billion of stock and American Express will sell $500 million. The JPMorgan offering will be priced by Tuesday morning, a person close to the matter said. The person was granted anonymity because the timing is not public.

If they’re able to sell the stock and “buy themselves out of TARP” they never should have taken the TARP funds in the first place.

Oh, cool! They’re coming out of bankruptcy just in time to sit idle while all the automative manufacturers are in bankruptcy. Well, almost all of them.

Delphi Corp (DPHIQ.PK) said on Monday it has reached a deal to sell most of its global operations to private equity firm Platinum Equity, allowing the car parts supplier to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

When it comes time to buy my next car, it won’t be a GM made vehicle. If I could get something for it, I would trade in my GMC right now for a Ford.

GM could have filed bankruptcy, closed 12 plants, and laid off 20,000 people without any help from our government.

Yesterday we heard the recession is coming to an end. Now that things are getting better, the government steps up and does what they promised to do six months ago.

The U.S. Treasury Department will on Tuesday tap a $50 billion housing rescue fund to pay off mortgage investors and reduce monthly payments for millions of borrowers, said a senior administration official.

Mortgage servicers that own a small stake in costly loans will receive a cash payment to either erase the debt or agree to accept a reduced return on their investment.

We all knew some drastic cuts were going to be made. Who knew it would be an entire make of car?

After 83 years of storied history and with a huge following for its famous older models, Pontiac on Monday became the highest-profile victim of the U.S. auto industry crisis with General Motors Corp’s announcement the brand would cease to exist in 2010.

Not everyone is down with the economy.

Apple Inc’s quarterly profit soared past Wall Street expectations on strong sales of iPhones and iPods, underscoring the popularity of the company’s relatively expensive products even in the midst of a weak economy.

Awesome news. Now if I could find a job so I could buy an iPhone…