Dec 23 Patchwork Nation: Some Good Economic News for the Holidays By Anna Shoup The map above shows how counties compare in Patchwork Nation's Hardship Index. Darker shades of red indicate tougher times over the past month, relative to the rest of the country. Just… Continue reading
Dec 23 Samuelson on Why You Should Study Economics Paul Solman: We continue this week with excerpts from an interview I did with Paul Samuelson in his office almost a decade ago, just after the dot.com collapse in the year 2000. I was helping make a series of videos… Continue reading
Dec 23 Wednesday's Headlines: Health Bill Marches Ahead; Personal Incomes Rise Lawmakers continue to work toward passage of a bill to reform the nation's health care system with one more procedural hurdle slated for Wednesday, before a final vote now planned for Christmas Eve morning. The third procedural vote comes… Continue reading
Dec 23 Watch Hallelujah!: How Handel Orchestrated a Classic Financial Portfolio When 18th century composer George Frideric Handel wrote his timeless "Messiah" oratorio, he not only penned a classic holiday composition, he also established a foundation for a new business approach to opera. Paul Solman reports. Continue watching
Dec 22 Chicago Community Mourns Loss of Local Bank By Carolyn O'Hara On the West side of Chicago, the loss of a bank that invested widely in local neighborhoods is being mourned by residents, who question why a bank's commitment to community is not considered part of its bottom line. Continue reading
Dec 22 Tuesday's Headlines: Bankers Meet With Obama; Health Bill Inches Forward President Barack Obama will meet Tuesday with representatives of a dozen small and community banks at the White House in a follow-up to a similar meeting he held last week with some of the nation's top bankers. Continue reading
Dec 22 Watch For Community Banks, Survival Can Often Trump Lending President Obama met with community bank leaders at the White House on Tuesday and pressed them to boost lending. Yet in a year in which some 140 community banks have been forced to close, the focus among small lenders is… Continue watching
Dec 21 What Will It Take to Jumpstart Job Creation? Question: It seems to be fairly well accepted that the military build-up for WWII was what finally brought us out of the Great Depression. Is there any movement afoot for the government to effectively… Continue reading
Dec 18 On Friday's NewsHour... The agreement reached at the Copenhagen Climate Summit is our lead story tonight, followed by an interview with Barry Scheck of the "Innocence Project" about the release of a wrongly-convicted man after 35 years, a Paul Solman conversation about the… Continue reading
Dec 18 Will 'Avatar' Take-off at the Box Office? By Molly Finnegan Opening Friday nationwide is James Cameron’s latest epic cinematic and technical feat. “Avatar,” a digital 3-D action adventure movie about human colonization of a distant moon already occupied by a race of blue aliens. Costing nearly $400 million for production… Continue reading