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August Heffner

IT’S game over for the American consumer. Inflation-adjusted personal consumption expenditures are on track for rare back-to-back quarterly declines in the second half of 2008 at a 3.5 percent average annual rate. There are only four other instances since 1950 when real consumer demand has fallen for two […]

Just as one crisis of confidence may be ending, another may be coming.
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The holiday season is not quite here yet, but retailers are already bringing out deep discounts.

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Here is a measure of just how grim the economic outlook is: It seems to make sense to pump billions more taxpayer dollars into Detroit’s automakers even though down the road they could quite possibly go bust anyway.
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One Argument for the Bailout
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Workers on Wall Street last Wednesday. Some, pushed out at the big merger banks, may now consider boutique firms attractive.

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. says his Troubled Asset Relief Program isn’t a bailout of Wall Street. And of course it shouldn’t be. […]

Every piece of your financial life involves at least a bit of risk. What made this week extraordinarily rare, and so terribly frightening, was that all of the threats were on display at once.
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Spending (a Bit) Less in Retirement
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DETROIT — Like a gas-thirsty S.U.V. crawling to the pump, General Motors needs to fill up fast with cash.
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Despite a broad overhaul since 2006, the nation’s largest automaker may soon have to raise new operating capital to offset a steep decline in United […]

As automakers dropped their latest batch of awful sales numbers on the market on Tuesday, reinforcing the gloom spreading across the economy, the troubles confronting American workers seemed to intensify.
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Plummeting home prices have […]

This month, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, broke from the usually banal official pronouncements about the dollar to talk bluntly about the risks of inflation. He told an international conference that a weakening dollar had caused an “unwelcome rise” in inflation and pledged to guard against such dangers.
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One evening last autumn a group of about 10 artist managers, including representatives for the pop stars Kylie Minogue and Robbie Williams as well as an executive who oversees the Beatles catalog, clustered around a table in an executive dining room at the London headquarters of EMI. The purpose was to size up the […]