The Sun's Financial Diary

As news surfaced that some of the nation’s biggest financial institutions would be paying out record bonuses to executives in 2009 (AIG drew particular fire for planning on dishing out $165 million) following the federal government’s half trillion dollar TARP bailout, a growing and increasingly vocal movement of U.S. taxpayers are letting it be known [...]

Since the Federal Reserve’s 75 basis points emergency rate cut on January 22nd, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gained more than 500 points in 5 trading sessions ended yesterday. The rally was partly fueled by speculation that when policy makers conclude their 2-day meeting this afternoon, another 0.50% rate reduction will be handed out [...]

It’s the Fed rate decision time again.
However, unlike the last meeting in September when the predictions on what the central bank would do were focusing on how much, not if, this time it’s a little bit uncertain.
The August negative job report released in early September, which probably have played a key role in the 50-basis [...]

The stock markets celebrated the 20th anniversary of Black Monday by sinking some 366 points of the Dow. Not exactly on the same scale percentage wise, but not too far away point wise from the worst one-day decline in the stock market history 20 years ago.
The 508 points drop of the Dow on October 19, [...]

When something bad happened, it’s not unusual for the party who’s responsible to find a scapegoat to take the blame. The convenient scapegoat in Mattel’s massive toy recalls this summer is obviously the Chinese manufacturers. They are thousands of miles away and can’t defend themselves here in the US amid media frenzy of the [...]

I don’t remember exactly when was the last time a FOMC meeting has generated so much anticipation, but it has to be quite a while as the Federal funds rate, the outcome of such a meeting, has been held steady for more than a year since June of 2006. For the past 15 months, investors [...]

When the Dow lost some 281 points last Friday to settle at the lowest close since May 1, I couldn’t imagine that it can make up all the losses in one session. Yet, it indeed happened as the index surged 286 points today, the largest one day gain in four years.
Looking at the [...]

No, this is not my proof, but I thought it’s quite funny how it’s presented (if you haven’t seen it before).
When I hit the Stumble button on my broswer, I was shown the following image from this site:

Not that I agree with the conclusion, but I didn’t find any flaw in the procedure [...]

We have standard license plates on our cars with no extra costs.
However, in China, people (or maybe only wealthy people) are crazy about license plates with so called lucky numbers such as 6, 8, or 9 (US Mint even sells Lucky Money around Chinese New Year every year with dollar bills containing these lucky numbers), [...]

Last week the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 13,000 points for the first time on April 25, 2007. Since then, the index has been setting record highs every day. The last time the Dow reached a milestone was on October 20, 2006, when it broke the 12,000 mark. That’s only 6 months and 5 [...]