Media

As early as today, the Republican leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives will be bringing H.R. 4078, the so-called “Red Tape Reduction and Small Business Job Creation Act” up for a vote.  Like so much of what passes for legislation in Congress these days, this legislation is more a statement of philosophy than a thought out piece of policy.

As we pointed out a few weeks ago, man-made climate change will make extreme weather events much more likely going forward and we are facing a pretty serious one now. More than half of the continental U.S.

In case you haven't been paying attention, a concerted effort has been underway for more than a year to depict low-income workers as tax freeloaders. Most taxes are paid by the rich, the argument goes -- the "job creators" -- while workers at the bottom are paying less and less.

As part of a commitment to measure well-being and happiness alongside GDP, Britain’s Office of National Statistic conducted a wellbeing population survey that compared happiness and anxiety levels by several demographic factors, including sex, age, and ethnicity. The study included four subjective well-being questions:

Work as a hotel housekeeper isn’t an easy job under any circumstances. For more than 400,000 predominantly female and immigrant workers, the work means lifting heavy mattresses, stretching to clean high surfaces, and often scrubbing bathroom floors on hands and knees. Full-time workers earn just $21,000 a year, on average.

The days between the Fourth of July and Bastille Day on the 14th are known for fireworks on both sides of the Atlantic. This year, more rockets and firecrackers than usual were going off, but they were inside hearing rooms in the British Parliament and the U.S. Congress. Barclays bank announced that it had been fined more than $450 million by regulators from both countries, and its CEO, Robert E. Diamond Jr., and COO, Jerry del Missier, both resigned. The fines were part of a settlement that granted Barclays immunity from potentially worse punishment for its manipulation of interest rates.

How will Marissa Mayer’s pregnancy play out? Will the new Yahoo chief executive find that it’s not so easy to power through a maternity leave? Or will she spend just a few short weeks at home — working all the while, as she promised in an interview — and thus set the bar high for future pregnant executives of Fortune 500 companies? What should the new “it” mom-to-be do?

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Department of Education released a new report detailing the private student loan market.  As the report states, private student loans mushroomed over the last decade, fueled by the very same forces that drove subprime mortgages through the roof: Wall Street’s seemingly endless appetite for new ways to make profit.

If you are aware of some of the specific derivatives and securities that are traded by banks and other financial services firms, you know that actual transactions in many of them occur infrequently. Prices based on what a willing buyer would pay a willing seller are difficult to come by. Let’s say you are a risk manager at one of these firms or perhaps a regulator curious about market exposures of a bank that you are tasked to monitor. How do you ascribe a value to a derivative or security if you cannot find a price in the market?