Wall Street

Alan Greenspan is warning in an interview with Bloomberg that we are in a bubble, a bond market bubble. The former Fed Chairman is concerned that inflation might surprise us and bond prices might fall sharply at some point in the near future. Here’s why that would be a disruptive thing. Click the audio player […]

Earnings season is well underway, and so far corporate profits for the second quarter have been pretty good. Surprisingly good, actually. Of the companies in the S&P 500 index that have reported results so far, most have exceeded analysts’ expectations. Plenty of earnings news is still to come, including reports tomorrow from biggies like Apple, […]

Commodity trading — often a big money maker for banks and hedge funds — has been subdued in recent months, leading to significant drops in revenue. Goldman Sachs recently said its commodity trading unit had the worst quarter on record, and other banks are in a similar situation. The reasons behind the slump? Lack of volatility and […]

The Federal Reserve probably will not announce a rate hike on the second day of its Federal Open Market Committee meeting on Wednesday. But there’s a decent chance it will again by year’s end. And since the Fed started raising rates 18 months ago, we’ve seen the federal funds rate rise a full 1 percent. […]

Four big banks (JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, PNC, Wells Fargo) reported earnings today, all beating expectations, especially JPMorgan, which posted its best quarter ever. That wind in the banks’ sails comes in the form of higher interest rate levels after three straight rate hikes by the Federal Reserve. That means banks get to charge you more […]

The nation’s biggest banks all passed their annual stress tests and bank stocks today took off. Earlier in the week, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen offered additional reassurance about the financial sector, saying she doesn’t think there will be another massive financial crisis in her lifetime. But traditional banks are only part of the picture […]

It was a busy day on Wall Street today, and there was good reason for that. It was the annual reshuffling of the popular trading benchmarks known as the FTSE Russell Indexes. Those indexes track the largest U.S. companies in the U.S. stock market, and they determine what’s in a bunch of securities mutual funds.  […]

The Federal Reserve raised interest rates about a quarter percent today, but yields on 10-year Treasury notes have been trading just around their 2017 lows — about 2.21 percent. That’s the interest rate paid to the borrower of these notes. Yields rise when traders expect inflation to increase, and, therefore, interest rates climb. So what […]

Just after President Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris agreement, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein tweeted his displeasure. Now, the blue-blood bank is going green in another way with a big move into wind and solar energy. Not just buying it, but pairing other buyers and sellers in the emerging market of […]