Finance

Similar measures worked in 2012.

Jay Powell continues to show his independence from Donald Trump.

After the Great Depression, Democrats ran against Herbert Hoover for 30 years—and with great success. Even though Hoover’s policies were anything but market-oriented—he greatly raised spending, taxes, and tariffs in response to the 1929 Wall Street crash—Republicans took the fall for Hooverism. It…

General Electric is divesting its finance business, starting with the sale of $26.5 billion of real estate assets. Back to its roots as an industrial manufacturing powerhouse, churning out jet engines, medical devices, oil drilling equipment and the other heavy equipment. Jeff Immelt finally has…

When writers become famous, it is easy to forget that they were once obscure, and sometimes very poor. Yet with few exceptions—Homer, Tacitus, Omar Khayyam, Jonathan Safran Foer—even the greatest writers had to slave away at menial positions before their careers took off and they could support…

Celebrating a fourth birthday and growing nicely. That’s the story of the Dodd-Frank law, designed to end a “too big to fail” banking system that forced taxpayers to bail out bankers who took not only their own banks but the entire financial system to the verge of collapse, and brought on a record…

To meteorologists, an inversion is a deviation from the normal change of an atmospheric property. It can lead to pollution and adverse health effects. To Wall Street dealmakers, and now to most boards of directors, an inversion is a cross-border merger that allows the buyer to reincorporate in a…

In January during his State of the Union Address, President Obama unveiled his new myRA program. “Let’s do more to help Americans save for retirement. Today, most workers don’t have a pension. A Social Security check often isn’t enough on its own. And while the stock market has doubled over the…

President Obama likes to promote his domestic policy agenda by highlighting economic competition from China. In particular, he has repeatedly pointed to China’s massive infrastructure investments to tout his proposals for infrastructure spending in America.

Sunday was September 15. It's an important anniversary, because it's the day that gave us President Barack Obama.

Take a visit to the cyber-belly of the beast, to a website run by the European Commission, the EU’s bureaucratic core, and you will be told that “the financial sector was a major cause of the [economic] crisis and received substantial government support.” Soon it will be payback time, in the form…

On Sunday, the leading experts on terrorism finance in the Middle East and North Africa will convene for a five-day conference. The Financial Action Task Force is essentially the United Nations for combating terror finance, and MENAFATF ranks among its most important regional bodies. So why is the…

For all the talk of "changing the culture in Washington," it appears to be business as usual ... only more so.  Things are done – when, and if, they are – by people who play a tough inside game with no spectators. Washington will soon be working on revisions to the tax laws – since, obviously, they…

In a press conference today, the Federal Reserve announced it will keep interest rates low and leave QE3 unchanged, continuing to buy $85 billion a month in bonds to prop up the economy.

Politicians are not known for originality. In their public speech, most cling to the security of clichéd stock phrases the way toddlers hold fast to threadbare blankets. Thus Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney posed before an enormous national debt clock and intoned that the nation’s…

President Barack Obama pledged this morning in his weekly radio address to continue to crackdown on "irresponsible behavior."

Earlier today, the Obama campaign pushed around a story that they claimed proved Mitt Romney "was against the auto bailout...but personally [benefited] from it."

Always looking "forward," President Obama has asked Bill Clinton—who was elected to the presidency 20 years ago—to speak tonight and suggest to the American people (whether explicitly or implicitly) that this is really a choice between Clinton and George W. Bush, rather than between Obama and Mitt…

Sandy Weill is calling for the banks to be broken up. Bloomberg reports: 

According to the pool report, "joining POTUS on the flight from San Fran was Penny Pritzker, the campaign's finance chair four years ago. Jay Carney said she was in the neighborhood."

Barack Obama's campaign just announced that it raised $71 million in the month of June, while earlier today Mitt Romney's campaign announced a $106 million June haul. The difference? Romney outraised Obama by $35 million in June.

C. Boyden Gray and Jim R. Purcell, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

Last week, Marc Lasry defended private equity on national television. "Private equity, do they do God's work or are they vampires?" a CNBC host asked Lasry, who is a hedge fund manager. "I think they do very good work," he replied.

This morning on CNN, Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was asked, "Why is it not hypocrisy for the president to take campaign donations from private equity when he's attacking private equity making that an essential part of his campaign?"

This may come as a shock to many pollsters and much of the press corps, but public opinion is a little more complicated than randomly calling 1,000 Americans, asking them a dubiously worded question about a complex political issue, and reporting the aggregate results.

President Obama’s budget for 2013 is pure Obama. How do we know? Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, was once asked how to become a budget expert. “You have to read the budget,” he said. To know Obama, it’s similar. You have to read the speeches and look over the budgets. 

Rush Limbaugh compares Newt Gingrich's attacks on Mitt Romney with Ross Perot's destructive assault on George H.W. Bush in 1992. It's a thought-provoking comparison.

Three Republican presidential candidates​—​Herman Cain, Ron Paul, and Newt Gingrich​—​have at least hinted about the desirability of a return to the gold standard. The four top Republican congressional leaders recently called on the Federal Reserve to curb its interventions in the U.S. economy. In…

The Wall Street Journal interviewed hedge-fund manager Paul Singer over the weekend: