The Mortgage Bankers Association is selling their building in Washington DC for $41.3 million, which sounds like a lot, except the trade group bought the building for $79 million in 2007 with the help of a $75 million loan from PNC Financial.
[This article is excerpted from Society Without Coercion.]
June 16, 1933. President Roosevelt signs Banking Act of 1933. To FDR’s immediate right and left are Sen. Carter Glass of Virginia and Rep. Henry Steagall of Alabama.
At the end of January, President Barack Obama announced that he is planning to introduce new regulations for the banking industry, to prevent excessive speculation. According to the president, no bank or financial institution that contains a bank will own, invest in, or sponsor a hedge fund or private equity fund, or have proprietary trading operations unrelated to serving customers for its own profit.
Besides providing for the most-desired consumer goods, the market provides for niche goods as well. Consider The World Almanac, the 1008-page compendium of summarized historical and out-of-date facts.
With the internet at my disposal, I can find in-depth research and up-to-the-minute data. Easy, too.
Yet, time and again, I find myself thumbing through the almanac. Not as a primary source, but as an enjoyable diversion — the original information surfing.
I would never buy one myself. But someone thought it would make a good Christmas gift. And he was right.
Charles Goyette Dollar Meltdown Video Interview from Michael Martin on Vimeo.
Author and radio show host Charles Goyette speaks with Michael Martin of MartinKronicle and Contributor to the LvMI Economics Blog about the state of the US economy, Bernanke’s re-appointment, and US long-term debt.
Wall Street analysts and financial pundits are struggling with a “conundrum,” declared the talking head on MSNBC this morning. Retail sales in stores open at least a year (”same-store sales”) posted an unexpected increase of 3.3 percent in January compared to a year earlier. Furthermore, labor productivity rose a seasonally adjusted 6.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009. This productivity improvement also exceeded expectations and implied a fall in per unit labor costs.
