Is Paul Ryan's budget plan a liability for Romney? Or are Dems celebrating too soon? Patricia Murphy, Zachary Karabell, and John Avlon take a closer look at the details.
Read moreRyan Budget Plan Sounds Good But Lacks Substance
The addition of Paul Ryan to the Republican ticket for the 2012 presidential election has been hailed by many as a welcome turn in the campaign away from vacuous mudslinging and toward a more substantive debate about pressing issues. Both Democrats and Republicans appear to welcome that debate, at least now. In that sense, Ryan’s nod for vice president is unequivocally a positive and does in fact inject what has been a curiously hollow campaign with a dose of real substance.
Read moreMarkets Continue to Rally
It was a year ago today that Standard & Poor's stripped the U.S. of its coveted AAA debt rating. CNBC's Zachary Karabell, Dan Greenhaus, Michael Farr & Rick Santelli offer insight on the market rally.
Read moreJobs Report Hides Real Change in U.S. Economy
Friday’s jobs report was immediately heralded as a strong rebound from months of weak employment growth. With the jobless rate at 8.3 percent, barely changed from 8.2 percent last month, financial markets, ever fickle and always flighty, staged a relief rally after a week of disappointments that the central banks of the world were not swooping in cavalry-like to the rescue.
Read moreIs the GDP Report Really Important?
Today’s GDP report is proof of something that many have long suspected. Not, as the first headlines shouted, that the U.S. economy is in trouble, but that we need to stop using these numbers as proxies for how we are faring as a nation.
Read moreWall Street’s Irrational Negative Reaction to Apple’s Earnings Report
A large multinational company announces that its business has grown significantly from a year earlier, that its earnings are up more than 20 percent and its sales up nearly 25 percent. Its products continued to see strong demand around the world, with the only negative being that some people apparently held off buying because they wanted to wait for the newest version.
Read moreYahoo Aims to Achieve Turnaround Dream With Hire of Marissa Mayer
In the past year, several tech companies that once seem inviolable have fractured badly—Research in Motion and Nokia most notably. Yahoo, which yesterday announced a surprising and energetic choice of Marissa Mayer as its new CEO, is not in such dire straits, but only just. Its revenues have been on a multiyear secular decline, occasionally flowing, mostly ebbing; it lost the battle with Google as a search engine; and its content, while stellar, may be unable to support its current structure and identity. Mayer is a bold hire, and visions of another turnaround, that of Apple in the late 1990s, must surely be a dream. The question will be whether that dream has any chance of becoming real.
Read moreDon’t Just Blame Banks for Barclays Interest-Rates Mess
What began with a scandal that brought down the management of the venerable British bank Barclays is rapidly escalating. Barclays traders attempted to manipulate an obscure benchmark for global interest rates known as LIBOR, and it is now evident that Barclays was far from alone in its behavior.
Read moreUnemployment Report: Why Job Growth Is Stalling
Today’s jobs report, released to a sweltering nation, will do nothing to dispel the political heat. According to numbers compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, job growth remained stubbornly anemic, with 80,000 new jobs added in June.
Read moreThe Fed’s Forthright Admission About Our Messy Economic Situation
The Federal Reserve concluded its June meeting today with a statement and a Ben Bernanke press conference. A variety of measures were announced, including an extension of an arcane but consequential policy of buying hundreds of billions of dollars of Treasury bonds ($267 billion to be exact) in order to keep interest rates low, on top of the $400 billion the Fed has already purchased since last September.
Read moreElection Shows Greece Unlikely to Cause Financial Meltdown, Despite Gloom and Doom
The eyes of the financial world were on Greece once again this weekend, as the Hellenes went to the polls for the second time in six weeks. It’s fair to say that the world hasn’t been this focused on Greece for more than 2,000 years, and the ability of this nation of 11 million people to hold the world in thrall is, on the face of it, rather extraordinary.
Read moreWhat Jamie Dimon’s Senate Testimony Got Right
The JPMorgan Chase CEO is more correct than we’d like to believe about the impossibility of regulating risk.
Read moreJobs Numbers: Get Used to Bad Employment Data
Today’s employment figures show that America has entered job stasis. The headline number—69,000 jobs added—was weak at best, made worse by revised data for March and April that subtracted another 50,000 jobs, give or take. The unemployment rate nudged up to 8.2 percent from 8.1 percent, but truly the most notable thing about this release was that there was nothing truly notable.
Read moreMarkets Relieved at Spain Bailout Deal, Financial World Still Worried
Over the weekend, the Spanish government bowed to the necessity of seeking a bailout for its banking system. The amount was large: $125 billion in loans from the European Union to stave off the collapse of Spanish banks. The result was greeted with relief by financial markets around the world, with stocks initially rising, bond prices falling, and the outflows from southern European banks for the moment stanched.
Read moreScott Walker Won Because He Took Action Against Soaring Pension Costs
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker survived his recall vote with surprising ease. This contest is already being used as a proxy for the November general election, with tea-leaf reading being in ample supply. Republicans have been quick to crow that the victory represents a referendum for conservative fiscal policy and austerity in
Read moreStiglitz: Wall Street Lures Talent, America Suffers
The Daily Beast's Zachary Karabell sits down with renowned economist Joseph Stiglitz to talk about a less-discussed form of inequality: how our country's best young minds end up working on Wall Street instead of innovating in laboratories or at universities.
Read moreStiglitz: Wall Street Lures Talent, America Suffers
The Daily Beast's Zachary Karabell sits down with reknowned economist to talk about a less-discussed form of inequality: how our country's best young minds end up innovating on Wall Street instead of in laboratories or at universities.
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Read moreSparks Fly At Goldman Meeting
Goldman Sachs' shareholder meeting took place today and CEO Lloyd Blankfein made statements on bank regulations, the Volcker Rule and Europe, reports CNBC's Mary Thompson.
Read moreWall Street, Not Facebook, Bears Most of the Blame for the Company’s IPO Debacle
All the actors in the Facebook IPO debacle look bad, Zachary Karabell writes, but most of the blame should be directed at Morgan Stanley and the other banks that underwrote the stock offering. Plus, Dan Lyons breaks down 7 things to know about the scandal.
Read moreLife and Career of Chester A. Arthur
Zachary Karabell examined Chester Alan Arthur, who was propelled into the presidency by the assassination of James Garfield and turned his back on the patronage system that had nurtured him. Mr. Karabell argued that in creating a professional civil service he set America on a course toward even greater reforms in the decades to come.
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