Free Republic

Fed’s Powell to double down of hawish rate message. Or banks and consumers can expect no sugar tonight. Expect a hawkish Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to double down on the Fed’s commitment to vanquish inflation at his semiannual testimony before Congress on June 21-22. While the immediate audience will be lawmakers, the message will be aimed at markets, which remain unconvinced the Fed will hike by another 50 basis points, as indicated in the dot plot from the June FOMC meeting. Powell may raise his hawkish tone to push back against such views. Even as Powell is putting on a...

Just how much the Great Recession reshaped baby boomer retirements is becoming clearer: More than ever they expect to retire later or work when they're "retired." In 1991, just one in 10 workers told the Employee Benefit Research Institute that they planned to wait to retire until they were older than 65. By 2007, three in 10 said that. This year? More than four in 10. Boomers cruising toward a traditional retirement suffered a financial comeuppance in the economic slump that began in late 2007. The downturn sapped jobs, stock and housing values, and interest on savings. Many also were...

The Great Recession wasn't the result of subprime mortgage madness, according to a new report from the National Bureau of Economic Research. It was just a plain old bank panic. Yeah, but weren't bank panics supposed to be a thing of the past, thanks to the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1934? That's the problem. The report, by Yale economics professor Gary Gorton, says subprime mortgage securitization was a mess -- a house of cards probably doomed to fall -- but subprime by itself simply wasn't big enough to put the entire financial system at risk. That...

Smurfit-Stone Container Corp. announced on Monday the permanent closure of its linerboard plant in Frenchtown, effective Dec.31. The news came as a shock to the plant's 417 workers, all of whom will lose their jobs.