(The Fiscal Times 11/10/2011)
The announcement last week that the economy produced a meager 80,000 jobs in October makes battles over how to get the economy moving again all that more important, but on Capitol Hill, lawmakers have only just turned their attention to reviving a program that could, in relatively short order, pump billions of dollars into the hands of potential job creators: small business owners.
(ProPublica 4/15/2013)
The FDA found that hundreds of drugs were approved for the US market based on potentially unreliable research at MDS Pharma Services in Quebec. But the agency dragged its heels investigating MDS, and kept all the suspect drugs on the market.
(The Fiscal Times 11/14/2011)
If large banks around the country were hoping that “Bank Transfer Day" on Nov. 5 was just a one-time affair, well, there's some bad news.
(The Fiscal Times 12/13/2011)
Walmart, the retail giant with some 650 stores across the nation, has long raised the hackles of traditional banks by providing financial services to its customers. A few years ago, when the company was pursuing a bank charter, the banking industry did all it could to prevent the company from landing one. The banks succeeded in blocking Walmart’s bid. Now, they may be regretting that.
(ProPublica 4/15/2013)
Despite finding "egregious" violations at a major pharmaceuticals testing facility, the FDA allowed drugs approved on the firm's research to stay on the market.
(ProPublica 4/23/2013)
Even though it was investigating "egregious" misconduct at pharmaceuticals testing firm Cetero research, the FDA approved a new drug based on tests conducted there. It would later require those tests to be redone, but the drug remained on pharmacy shelves nationwide.
(American Banker 12/1/2011)
As head of Citibank's operations in Venezuela in the 1970s, William R. Rhodes was summoned to a meeting with the country's minister of development, where his bank was subjected to a very colorful threat.
(Chronicle Newspapers 12/12/2010)
Reelected to a second term last month in the teeth of political winds favoring Republicans, Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly, of Virginia’s 11th District, is headed into a very different Congress from the one he joined in 2009.
(American Banker 8/15/2011)
Lots of banks are under immense pressure to grow. None of them are expected to accomplish that with loans, interchange fees or much else anytime soon. Deal-minded Wall Streeters forcefully and repeatedly offer this answer: buy somebody else, or sell.
But the Dodd-Frank Act makes that an especially painful option to consider for midsize banks like First Horizon National Corp., USAA Federal Savings, Rabobank and New York Community Bancorp.
(American Banker 6/10/2010)
Every year, conferences draw throngs to hotel ballrooms, studies are conducted and consultants peddle expensive research papers, all on the question of how to deliver financial services to underbanked consumers.
Two assumptions have underpinned the conversation: one, that these consumers would be drastically better off if they were served by federally insured financial institutions; and two, that such for-profit financial institutions can make money by serving the underbanked.
Trouble is, those assumptions don't always stand up to strict scrutiny.
(The Fiscal Times 6/26/2011)
Is the Federal Home Loan Bank System, which issues more debt securities than any other entity in the country besides the federal government, taking too many risks?
(The Fiscal Times 9/15/2011)
Of the many financial reforms in Dodd-Frank, a requirement that lenders retain a share of the risk in mortgages they sell to investors seemed like a no-brainer. If lenders were on the hook, too, the thinking went, they would tighten standards and avoid the kind of defaults that contributed to the collapse of the housing market and the financial crisis.
But now that a rule to implement this provision has been written, critics say the requirement will make it so hard to get a mortgage that it will further depress the housing market and undercut a struggling economy.
(American Banker 10/11/2011)
Since being seized by the government during the financial crisis, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac haven't been businesses so much as government-owned mortgage utilities. That status was supposed to be temporary, but three years later, lawmakers have shown little appetite for changing it.
(American Banker 10/5/2011)
When HSBC CEO Stuart Gulliver announced earlier this year that the company would abandon its push to bring six million account holders into its Premier banking service, it appeared to confirm what some observers of the banking industry have long believed: trying to provide specialized financial services to the mass affluent through bank branches is a mug's game.
(American Banker Magazine 7/1/2011)
With all the privileges they supposedly have over banks, it would seem unlikely that credit unions would want to become thrifts.
So why are several experts on charter conversions predicting a wave of them?
(American Banker 5/2/2011)
In 1974, fresh out of law school, Edward Pinto joined a Michigan affordable housing agency. By 1989 he was a top executive at Fannie Mae. Today Pinto is the go-to housing finance pundit -- from the pro-privatization set.
(U.S. Banker Magazine 4/1/2011)
Consider this tale of two cities: Grand Forks, North Dakota, suffered massive flooding that left it economically crippled in April 1997. So did East Grand Forks, just across the river in Minnesota. Three years later, Grand Forks had lost 3 percent of its population, and East Grand Forks had lost 17 percent.
Those who are pushing for states like Illinois and Washington to create a publicly owned bank insist this difference in economic recovery is no coincidence. They give much of the credit for Grand Forks' resiliency-only one minute by car from its Minnesota counterpart-to the 92-year-old Bank of North Dakota, the country's only state-owned bank.
(American Banker 3/15/2011)
When JPMorgan Chase & Co. became the last of the nation's four biggest banking companies to announce that it was doing away with no-strings-attached free checking accounts, the question naturally arose among bankers in general: Is totally free checking dead?
(American Banker Magazine 1/1/2012)
Have banks given up on making a connection to their communities? From the bleachers at one Little League field, it sure looks that way.
(Columbia Magazine 4/28/2010)
As the global economy slogged through the worst of the financial crisis in late 2008 and most of 2009, the insurance industry seemed to be mired as deeply as any other sector of the financial services industry.
(American Banker 10/24/2011)
Though their circumstances are unique, their success in growing by many measures against long odds -- and largely without making acquisitions -- is a reminder to competitors that financial institutions can flourish even in weak economic conditions by thinking creatively and providing impeccable service, industry observers say.
(Bob Woodward 9/15/2012)
In the author's note to his 2012 book The Price of Politics, journalist and author Bob Woodward wrote, "Rob is...one of the best natural editors and reporters I have ever worked with." I worked closely with Woodward on his New York Times best-selling account of the 2011 debt ceiling debacle.
(ProPublica 4/14/2013)
When a generic drug differs from the name brand version, the consequences for patients can be sever, and frightening.
(ProPublica 4/15/2013)
The FDA determined that a major laboratory had committed such "egregious" and pervasive research violations that years of its tests might be invalid. About 100 drugs were on the market based on testing done there. But the FDA won't say which ones. ProPublica found six of them.