The Sun's Financial Diary

Where do you think the billions of dollars the government used to rescue banks came from?
They printed them, a lot!

Now that the $789 billion stimulus package is getting close to the final approval, the Treasury is going to print a lot more.
Scary, isn’t it?

*Thanks @MarketTrader for the tip.

While the Congress is still battling to get the final version of the massive 2009 economic stimulus package (could cost tax payers as much as $800 billion when the deal is finalized) done before the weekend, I think it’s time to get an idea on what we can expect from the stimulus plan and how [...]

The Labor Department reported on Friday that U.S. monthly unemployment rate hit 7.6% in January, the highest level since September 1992. The unemployment rate in December 2008 was 7.2%. In January, employers cut a total 598,000 jobs, the most monthly job losses in more than 34 years. Both the number of job losses and unemployment [...]

The Commerce Department yesterday released U.S. Personal Income and Outlays for December 2008. Among the published data, the one that caught my attention was personal savings rate. According to the report, personal savings rose to $378.6 billion in December from $299.1 billion in November. In terms of percentage, personal savings rate in December is 3.6%. [...]

The U.S. job market remains gloomy.
Early this month, the government statistics showed that monthly unemployment rate surged to 15-year high last month. Today, the Labor Department says Americans who file for new jobless insurance claims rose 30,000 for the week ending December 20, 2008, to reach 586,000, the highest level since November 1982. The more [...]

American households really took a hit in the third quarter of 2008.
Federal Reserve released its third quarter Flow of Funds Accounts of the United States today. According to the report, U.S. households lost $2.8 trillion in value from July to September to a total of $56.539 trillion. That’s a 4.7% decline from the second quarter. [...]

U.S. Labor Department released monthly unemployment data for November 2008 and it’s not a pretty picture: the monthly unemployment rate reached a 15-year high of 6.7% in November. The last time when monthly unemployment rate was this high was September 1993.
According to the report,  U.S. employers eliminated 533,000 non-farm positions last month, followed by 403,000 [...]

The Commerce Department released revised quarterly GDP data yesterday, showing that the nation’s economy contracted in the third quarter. The 0.5% annual decline in domestic gross product from July to September is worse than the initially estimated 0.3% and it’s the severest since the third quarter of 2001 when the economy shrank 1.4%.

Since the crisis [...]

Yesterday, the government announced that in employers shed more than 85,000 jobs in August. That’s the eighth monthly job loss in a row. Though historically, the unemployment rate now is nowhere near the level in the early 90s (the chart below is the historical monthly unemployment rate since 1990), last month’s 6.1% unemployment rate is [...]

Politicians in Washington acted pretty quickly this time to hammer out a stimulus package with tax rebates, for both individuals and businesses, as the center piece. According to the tentative deal announced today:
Most individuals who pay income taxes would get $600; working couples would receive $1,200. Workers who make at least $3,000 but don’t pay [...]