Articles About Financial Meltdown

Wobbly economies that shook up markets in 2011 took their toll on the world’s rich, though fast-growing Asia for the first time had more millionaires than North America.  According to the report, the global personal wealth of people worth $1 million declined in 2011 for the second time in four years, a side effect of […]

A new study  has found that many baby boomers plan to spend their money on themselves and forego giving their offspring any inheritance.  “My goal is when they carry me away in that box that my bank account is going to say zero,” said Carol Willison, a 60-year-old Seattle woman.  “I’m going to spoil myself […]

The estimated cost of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) keeps falling, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).   The latest estimate is that TARP will cost the taxpayers just $25 billion – significantly less than the $700 billion allocated for the financial bailout in the fall of 2008.  The CBO’s last estimate – […]

Two years after the global financial meltdown and collapse of Lehman Brothers, world leaders seem to have reached an impasse over crucial proposals designed to prevent the same devastating scenario from occurring in the future.  The stalemate is so serious that there may be little chance that needed changes will be made. Executives at the […]

Global banking regulators have agreed to implement new rules that will make the international banking industry safer and avoid future financial meltdowns. Known as Basel III — after the Swiss city in which the agreement was worked out — the new requirements will more than triple the amount of capital that banks must have in […]

Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) is enjoying a big victory in his last days in the Senate following passage of broad financial reform legislation designed to rein in the excesses that caused the financial meltdown.  First, the Senate and House versions of the bill must undergo reconciliation.  Under the new law, for example, homebuyers will have […]

A decade before the financial meltdown, one woman was sounding the alarm that a catastrophe was coming.  That woman is Brooksley Born, who correctly predicted that investments known as over-the-counter derivatives could cause a financial crisis.  As Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) during the second Clinton administration, Born would wake up “in […]