Finance news

The hamsters are fake, with a coating of fuzz over a mechanized chassis and a small sound system. But when it comes to creating intense desire among kids — and desperation among shopping parents — Zhu Zhu Pets are the real deal.
When the Post-Dispatch profiled the electronic rodents eight weeks ago, toymaker […]

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More than a year after the financial meltdown of 2008, Congress is moving forward on plans to drastically curtail the power of the Federal Reserve.
There is a debate about lawmakers’ motivations, and many details must still be worked out between different proposals.
Currently, the main bills in the House and Senate differ in specifics, […]

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Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Wednesday he believes strongly in the need to maintain a strong dollar and said the United States was determined to get its budget deficit down.
The dollar’s decline has been a source of concern in the export-heavy region, especially since top exporter China keeps its currency’s value closely managed […]

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Mortgage applications fell last week for the third week in a row, even as interest rates edged lower, an industry group said Wednesday.
The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) said its index of mortgage application volume fell 12.3% in the week ended Oct. 23 from the prior week.
The drop in activity came as a […]

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Hugh McGee is cutting the price of Guinness by about 20 percent at his bars and hotels in the Irish town of Letterkenny to keep customers coming across the border from Northern Ireland after the euro’s surge against the pound.
McGee reduced the price for a beer this month to 3.50 euros ($5.18) at […]

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Malaysia cut income tax for a second straight year, aiming to spur consumer spending and private investment and help the economy recover from a recession.
The top personal tax rate will be reduced to 26 percent in 2010 from 27 percent, Prime Minister Najib Razak said in his budget speech in Kuala Lumpur yesterday. […]

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Economists will disapprove of yesterday’s decision to award the Nobel Economics Prize to Elinor Ostrom because it signals a shift toward rewarding social scientists, said Steven Levitt, a University of Chicago professor and co-author of the bestseller “Freakonomics.”
Ostrom, a professor at Indiana University in Bloomington who calls herself a political economist, became the […]

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The U.S. government ended its 2009 fiscal year with a deficit of $1.4 trillion, the biggest since 1945, the Congressional Budget Office reported.
The deficit amounted to 9.9 percent of the nation’s economy, triple the size of the shortfall for 2008.
The nonpartisan CBO said yesterday the government was squeezed on both sides of […]

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Gold’s rally this year to a record shows commodity investors remain concerned that the U.S. economic recovery will spur inflation, even as Wall Street forecasts and government bonds suggest stable prices.
Bullion has jumped 18 percent this year, heading for a ninth straight annual gain, after futures touched a record $1,045 an ounce yesterday […]

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Fierce disagreement over how much power rich nations should cede to developing countries clouded talks between global finance chiefs on expanding the role of the International Monetary Fund.
The IMF, which has lent more than $50 billion to countries around the world this year, says it needs more resources to oversee the recovery of the […]

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