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NEW YORK (AP) - General Motors' November U.S. sales plunged 41 percent, while Ford's dropped 31 percent, dashing hopes that the industrywide drop in vehicle demand might be easing as Detroit's automakers prepare to state their second case for a federal bailout. Their overseas rivals posted abismal (???) results as well. Toyota's November sales tumbled 34 percent, and Honda's fell 32 percent. A dreary economy, swooning consumer confidence and tight credit markets have combined to keep consumers out of vehicle showrooms this year. On Monday, the National Bureau of Economic Research said the U.S. entered a recession in December 2007,...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Kaupthing Bank hf (KAUP.IC), Iceland's largest bank, has sought bankruptcy protection from its U.S. creditors. The Reykjavik-based lender filed a Chapter 15 bankruptcy petition on Sunday with the U.S. bankruptcy court for the Southern District of New York.

BANGKOK, Dec 3 (Reuters) - The Bank of Thailand surprised markets by cutting interest rates by a full point on Wednesday, saying the economic damage wrought by political unrest and the global downturn triggered its first easing since mid-2007. A rapid retreat in inflation in recent months made it easier for the central bank to slash rates by the biggest margin in over eight years to help the economy, hit by anti-government protests that culminated in an eight-day siege of Bangkok's main airports. "The political problem is having quite a severe impact on the economy," BoT Assistant Governor Duangmanee Vongpradhip...

WASHINGTON - In the last month of the presidential campaign, it was one of Barack Obama and Joe Biden's strongest attack lines: John McCain, they warned, would "tax your healthcare benefits for the first time ever." But now, some Congressional Democrats in charge of health reform are talking about doing just that. They would not go as far as McCain, who wanted to end the tax exclusion entirely for employer-sponsored insurance, which excludes money spent by employees and their employers on health benefits from income and payroll taxes. But some key Democrats are talking about limiting the benefit for workers,...

The end of the work week is generally welcomed, giving rise to the term "TGIF" -- Thank God it's Friday. But the expansion of the U.S. economic crisis has given rise to a new and more worrying acronym: "FDIC Friday." FDIC is a reference to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. This US government agency is charged with the task of limiting "the effect on the economy and the financial system when a bank or thrift institution fails," according to its website. And "FDIC Friday" refers to the fact that Friday is usually the day of the week when the FDIC...

NEW YORK, Nov 25 (Reuters) - Two of New York's four major daily newspapers slammed the board of Citigroup Inc (C.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) on Tuesday, with a New York Post editorial calling for all of the directors to be removed and the Wall Street Journal saying most of them did not deserve to remain. The day after the government stepped in to rescue the New York-based bank with an injection of $20 billion and a plan to shoulder most of the potential losses on $306 billion of toxic assets, the New York Post said that "they need...

The federal government agreed Sunday to take unprecedented steps to stabilize Citigroup Inc. by moving to guarantee close to $300 billion in troubled assets weighing on the bank's books, according to people familiar with details of the plan. Treasury has agreed to inject an additional $20 billion in capital into Citigroup under terms of the deal hashed out between the bank, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Treasury officials will charge a higher interest rate for the capital injection -- 8% for the first few years -- than it has charged to dozens of...

Fed policymakers will take 'whatever steps necessary'WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - Federal Reserve policymakers now expect the U.S. economy to contract for as much as a year, with the risk that the slowdown could persist for even longer, according to edited minutes of a closed-door meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee on Oct. 28 and 29. The Fed governors and Fed bank presidents "generally expected the economy to contract moderately in the second half of 2008 and the first half of 2009, and agreed that the downside risks to growth had increased," the minutes said. Without using the word, the Fed...

The U.S. economy is in the toilet because Congress, led by Sen. Christopher Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, browbeat lenders into giving mortgages to unqualified borrowers. To date, the government has allocated almost $4 trillion it doesn't have to try to repair the resulting economic damage. Unchastened by the experience, Congress may lend the nation's Big Three automakers $25 billion to keep them afloat into 2009. Congress has become the bank of last resort for General Motors, Ford and Chrysler because they no longer can get private financing. For good reason. Combined, they have a negative net worth exceeding $60...

<p>The White House on Friday threw its support behind a plan to speed release of $25 billion in existing loans to the Big Three automakers but rejected a Democratic proposal to use money from a financial bailout to help the troubled industry.</p>

The state-sponsored bail-outs of western banks risk rewarding management teams for failure, the chief executive of HSBC warned. Michael Geoghegan’s comments on Monday reflect a deep frustration the recent bail-outs has caused among executives at HSBC, which, despite suffering heavy losses in the US mortgage market, has weathered the credit crisis in better shape than many of its rivals. He said: “There is no question that guarantees have been given to failed managements. “I hope these guarantees don’t last too long because they may create the wrong type of behaviour by managements in those banks.” He added that they risked...

On Friday, the Federal Reserve, SEC and CFTC announced an agreement to begin anointing "central counterparties" for the credit default swap market. Before the pols create still more institutions that are too big to fail, and further endanger taxpayers, they might want to spend time defining the problem they intend to solve. The same goes for House Oversight Chairman Henry Waxman. On Thursday he held his latest hearing designed to blame everything other than failed housing policy for the credit debacle. Eager to avoid being scapegoated, hedge-fund managers at the hearing agreed that the credit default swap market is a...

As we have seen in recent months, financial turmoil anywhere in the world affects economies everywhere in the world. And so this weekend I'm going to host a Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy with leaders from developed and developing nations that account for nearly 90% of the world economy. The leaders attending this weekend's meeting agree on a clear purpose -- to address the current crisis, and to lay the foundation for reforms that will help prevent a similar crisis in the future. This crisis did not develop overnight, and it's not going to be solved overnight....

Obama is making me rich. When the stock market went up 4% on election day, I saw no evidence of a Republican surge to support that, so I shorted the E-mini S&P futures. After the market tanked for a few days, I went long, since even under socialists the market won't go straight down. At yesterday's close I shorted again. I have found in backtests that it has been profitable to buy/sell S&P futures when they have been down/up for a few days. Interested Freepers should do their own analysis. Of course, there is no guarantee that any pattern will...

A week ago Gordon Brown went cap in hand to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to ask them to help bail out the stricken economies of the West by pumping billions into the International Monetary Fund. This loan comes with a devastating IOU — nothing less than a big slice of control over Britain and the West by a regime at the heart of the attempt to bring about the Islamisation of the free world. It is Saudi money which has fuelled the enormous spread of Wahhabi mosques, preachers and educational institutions in this country, delivering the message of...

-snip Federal bank regulators changed their mind Wednesday, revealing they have rejected a request by banks and consumer advocates for a program to let lenders forgive huge portions of credit card debt. A Treasury Department agency rejected the request for a special program that would allow as much as 40 percent of credit card debt to be forgiven for consumers who don't qualify for existing repayment plans. An agency official says it objects to allowing banks to defer tax losses for several years on the forgiven debt, as would occur under the special program.

BOSTON (Reuters) – General Electric Co (GE.N) has secured the temporary backing of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp for up to $139 billion of the debt of its finance arm, a spokesman said on Wednesday. "We are eligible now and included in the FDIC temporary liquidity guarantee program," said Russell Wilkerson, a spokesman for the U.S. conglomerate.

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) took a whack at the Bush administration on Wednesday for failing to disclose all of the financial institutions that are getting emergency loans under the $700 billion bailout. Boehner said the Treasury and Federal Reserve should comply with a Freedom of Information Act request into who is receiving taxpayer money, and “they must begin providing lawmakers and taxpayers all information about how they are using federal tax dollars.” Boehner said the bipartisan negotiations behind the financial bailout package stressed the need for meaningful oversight of how the money was being spent.

Paulson's speech and in particular the bit about not using tarp funds to buy troubled mortgage assets from banks is a striking negative for financial equities in my opinion. When the initial plan was announced these stocks absolutely ripped on the hope they could dump their bad mortgages (Alt-A, subprime, pick-a-pay, etc, etc) on the government and not have to mark them to market (Citi's ABS CDO book still marked 58 cents on the dollar) and take losses. Now that this is off the table atleast for now, the government will only be able to inject dillutive equity into the...

American Express Co. which is being hit by slowing consumer spending and rising defaults, is seeking roughly $3.5 billion in taxpayer-funded capital from the federal government, according to people familiar with the situation. The card issuer is the latest company not directly hit by the housing crisis to request cash from the federal government. While retailers, car companies and others hit by the slowdown in consumer spending haven't gotten the government money, financial firms of all kinds are getting federal bailouts. It isn't clear if the application under ...