In 2009, as the banking business was on the verge of being reshaped by new regulations in the wake of the great financial crisis, the private equity giant Apollo Global Management found a way to make money off the retirement savings of millions of everyday Americans. Through Athene, an insurer it helped create and later […]
Read MoreTag: Banking and Financial Institutions
Supreme Court Skeptical in That Could Hobble Consumer Watchdog
A majority of the justices at a Supreme Court argument on Tuesday seemed ready to reject a challenge to the constitutionality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency set up during the Obama administration to crack down on abuses by banks and other financial services providers. The justices appeared unpersuaded by the argument against […]
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Crypto Goes on Trial, as Sam Bankman-Fried Faces His Reckoning
A year ago, Sam Bankman-Fried was a fixture on magazine covers and in the halls of Congress, a tousle-haired crypto billionaire who hobnobbed with movie stars and bankrolled political campaigns. On Tuesday, the founder of the failed FTX digital currency exchange is set to leave the jail where he has been confined for more than […]
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Wall Street’s Most Hated Regulator Faces an Existential Threat
Rohit Chopra became one of the most powerful financial regulators by pairing bark with bite. As director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he has attacked — often with a hammer — the perpetrators of what he considers injustices against everyday Americans. When the bureau slapped Wells Fargo last year with $3.7 billion in fines […]
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How China’s Property Crisis Is Testing Its Too-Big-to-Fail Banks
China’s giant banking system, the world’s largest, is heavily exposed to the real estate crisis: Nearly 40 percent of all bank loans are related to property. And pressure is building on those banks as dozens of real estate developers have defaulted or missed payments on overseas bonds, led by China Evergrande, the world’s most indebted […]
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Inflation Measure Favored by the Fed Cooled in August
Federal Reserve officials received more good news in their battle against rapid inflation on Friday, when a key inflation measure continued to slow, the latest evidence that a return to normal after the pandemic and higher interest rates are combining to wrestle rapid price increases back to a more normal pace. The Personal Consumption Expenditures […]
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Greece, Battered a Decade Ago, Is Booming
Paris Skouros pointed toward the sky outside his office in Athens on a recent weekday. In the past six months, four high-rises had sprung up, built by Greek and international builders to be sold for use as tourist rentals, foreign real estate investments and company offices. Farther afield, a fresh crop of new buildings dotted […]
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You’ve Got (Scam) Mail
SCRATCH Is everyone being swindled all the time and just not talking about it? By Julia Rothman and Shaina Feinberg Julia is an illustrator. Shaina is a writer and filmmaker. Sept. 22, 2023 A few months ago, I received an email that, at first glance, looked like dozens of others that arrived in my inbox […]
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Real Estate Crisis Triggers New Alarms Over China’s Shadow Banks
An accountant in northeast China deposited her life savings and received a letter guaranteeing her investment in a trust firm. Workers at a state-owned utility pooled money from friends and relatives believing that their investments were backed by the government. A man sank $140,000 into an account that he was told would make a 10.1 […]
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Can Ghana’s Debt Trap of Crisis and Bailouts Be Stopped?
Emmanuel Cherry, the chief executive of an association of Ghanaian construction companies, sat in a cafe at the edge of Accra Children’s Park, near the derelict Ferris wheel and kiddie train, as he tallied up how much money government entities owe thousands of contractors. Before interest, he said, the back payments add up to 50 […]
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What Retail Sales and Other Data Say About China’s Economy
China’s trains, planes, stores and beaches were a little fuller last month than a year ago, and the pace of activity picked up at factories, particularly those making mobile phones and semiconductors. A batch of numbers released on Friday by China’s National Bureau of Statistics showed a modest improvement in the country’s overall retail sales […]
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Meet the Man Making Big Banks Tremble
Yelling at Michael Barr, the Federal Reserve’s top banking regulator, has never been particularly effective, his friends and co-workers will tell you. That hasn’t stopped America’s biggest banks, their lobbying groups and even his own colleagues, who have reacted to his proposal to tighten and expand oversight of the nation’s large lenders with a mix […]
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European Central Bank Raises Rates for a 10th Time
The European Central Bank on Thursday raised interest rates for a 10th consecutive time in an effort to force inflation down. The bank lifted its three key interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point, raising the deposit rate to 4 percent, the highest in the central bank’s two-decade history. “Inflation continues to decline […]
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People’s Bank of China Cuts Reserve Requirement to Spur Bank Lending
China’s central bank announced a policy change on Thursday that will allow the country’s banks to lend more money, but a nationwide economic slowdown has left many companies and households wary of borrowing. The move is the latest in a series of economic stimulus measures by the Chinese government as growth has failed to rebound […]
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What Biden Can Learn from Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” helped raise America’s economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s and set the country on course to become a superpower. And now, for the first time in decades, we have someone in the White House who has a new New Deal within his grasp. President Biden’s infrastructure […]
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