November 30, 2008

Americans Have Lost Their Appetite for Spending

By: Floyd Norris, New York Times

AS the holiday shopping season begins, American consumers say they are less interested in consuming than at any other time in the past four decades. That negative outlook, brought on by the credit crisis and recession, has led...

November 22, 2008

And You Thought 1931 Was Bad for the Market

By: Floyd Norris, New York Times

THIS is shaping up as the year when almost nothing went up.

Even after Friday’s large stock market rally, only 10 of the stocks in the Standard & Poor’s 500, the premier American stock index, are higher than they were at the...

November 16, 2008

Be Glad You’re Not Warren Buffett

By: Floyd Norris, New York Times

FEELING bad about how much you have been hurt by the stock market plunge? At least you don’t have a lot of stock options. A survey of the paper losses suffered by 175 chief executives of American companies shows that they lost a...

November 14, 2008

Accountability Needed With Bailouts

By: New York Times

If you are going to hand out rescue packages, it helps to understand how bad the problem is, and to have some grasp of what is needed to fix it.

November 14, 2008

U.S. Sneezes, and Nearly Everyone Catches a Cold

By: Floyd Norris, New York Times

THIS was the fall that the orders stopped coming. In nearly every major economy, companies have reported a slowing in business, which seems to have begun at about the time that Lehman Brothers failed in mid-September. The credit...

October 14, 2008

Getting The Lenders To Lend; A CRISIS IN FINANCE

By: The International Herald Tribune
Floyd Norris - The New York Times Media Group

Mark Landler contributed reporting.

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But will the banks lend to each other? At the end of a weekend when nearly all of the world's major bankers and finance ministers gathered in Washington to stanch the global credit crisis,...

October 10, 2008

A Crisis From Lessons Not Learned

By: The International Herald Tribune
Floyd Norris - The New York Times Media Group

Imagine what Republicans would have said a few months ago had someone proposed that the government should lend money to companies that could not get credit in the free market.

Imagine what Democrats would have said if it turned...

October 7, 2008

As Europe Scrambles, Global Stocks Tumble; Governments Try To Bolster Ailing Banks And Reassure Savers

By: The International Herald Tribune
Floyd Norris - The New York Times Media Group

This article was reported by Carter Dougherty, Nelson D. Schwartz and Floyd Norris. Dougherty reported from Frankfurt, Schwartz from Paris and Norris from New York. Katrin Bennhold and David Jolly contributed reporting from...

October 4, 2008

Labor Market Raises Red Flags; Off The Charts

By: The International Herald Tribune
Floyd Norris - The New York Times Media Group

Americans have concluded that it is tough to get a job. That fact, along with a host of other issues, ranging from high gasoline prices to falling home prices and the credit crisis, provides reason to expect consumer spending to...

September 30, 2008

What's Left After Economic First Aid?; CRISIS ON WALL STREET

By: The International Herald Tribune
Floyd Norris - The New York Times Media Group

Even before Congress passes a $700 billion bank bailout that nearly all legislators believe to be both necessary and unpopular, the jostling has begun over legislation that may prove to be the first test for the next U.S....