The stock market bounced around Thursday as traders reacted to news from Europe and looked ahead to the government's monthly employment report.
Weak earnings from Pfizer and other companies held back major market indexes on Tuesday as the Standard & Poor's 500 flipped between slight gains and losses.
Along with the cherry blossoms, hordes of bureaucrats descended on Washington for the spring meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The meeting concluded with, among other things, a communique from the International Monetary and Financial Committee urging the United States and the European countries, including the United Kingdom, to keep the money spigots flowing and ease up on austerity.
There is a deal in place that will bail out the government of Cyprus — but only after extracting more than $5 billion from bank depositors and plunging the economy into uncertainty. It virtually guarantees the island nation will stay in the recession that has been plaguing it for the past six quarters.
Money that's been trapped in Cyprus banks for the last two weeks could begin to cross the Atlantic and flood the American banking system starting Thursday when banks on the European island reopen, one banking expert predicts.
Money that's been trapped in Cyprus banks for the last two weeks could begin to cross the Atlantic and flood the American banking system starting Thursday when banks on the European island reopen, one banking expert predicts.
In 1922, the German political theorist Carl Schmitt wrote a book called “Political Theology,” in which he made the now often quoted statement, “Sovereign is he who decides the exception.” What he meant was that the best way to tell who is truly in charge in a nation is to see who the person is who has the power to change the rules – even if changing the rules means changing or suspending the constitution and invalidating the rule of law.
Stocks fell Tuesday on Wall Street as investors fretted about the latest chapter in Europe's debt saga.
Europeans have so many nations in financial trouble that they came up with an acronym, PIIGS, to keep track of the worst: Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain. Now a sixth nation, Cyprus, is about to join this less-than-illustrious group.
