East West Bank of Pasadena, California will assume all of the deposits and most of the assets of the failed bank, which had about $441.1 million in deposits and $520.9 million in assets as of March 31, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said. The community bank industry has been slower to bounce back from the deep recession than other parts of the economy. While many big banks and other financial... 

Just a little over a week after issuing its annual earnings report featuring a full-throated defense of its role in the housing market collapse, Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs, along with one of the company’s vice presidents, has been accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of securities fraud for its role in the housing market collapse. The SEC is charging the financial firm with defrauding... 

The world’s top central bankers began arriving in Australia for high-level talks as renewed fears about the strength of the global economic recovery gripped world share markets. Representatives from 24 central banks and monetary authorities, including the US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank, landed in Sydney to meet tomorrow at an undisclosed location. Organised by the Bank for International... 

About 5.1 million mortgage holders (or roughly 10% of Americans with mortgages) will own homes that are worth 75% or less than what they owe on their mortgages by mid-June. This is the conclusion of a new study by First American CoreLogic given exclusively to The New York Times. One of the firm’s senior economists, Sam Khater, told the paper, “People’s emotional attachment to their... 

By Alan Beattie at ft.com Put a jaguar, a bear, a tiger and a panda together and you might get a good show but you won’t get a quiet life. The Bric grouping – Brazil, Russia, India and China – has become a shorthand for the rise of emerging markets in the global economy. And after a rather stellar decade, the Brics mainly had a good crisis from which they are now rapidly exiting. Goldman Sachs,... 

Japan Airlines today filed for bankruptcy in an attempt to reverse the fortunes of a once-revered corporate icon now saddled with billions of dollars of debt and a reputation for mismanagement and inefficiency. The airline’s board decided to place the company at the mercy of a state-led restructuring plan that will require it to shed almost 15,700 jobs and cut more than 30 unprofitable routes. ... 

HONG KONG — For the first time, Chinese investment in U.S. companies has eclipsed U.S. purchases of Chinese entities, a trend analysts say is fueled partly by depressed American assets. In 2009, Chinese buyers snapped up $3.9 billion of U.S. assets, nearly four times the level in 2008, says Dealogic, a data-tracking firm. By comparison, U.S. buyers plowed $3 billion into Chinese entities last year,... 

It has long been obvious that the defeat of the incumbent, Viktor Yushchenko, who has painted himself into the anti-Russian nationalist corner, would produce a political rapprochement between Ukraine and Russia. Mr. Yanukovych is committed to non-alignment (meaning no application for NATO membership) while Ms. Tymoshenko promises to submit to popular referendum any decision to join a military alliance... 

The US Federal Reserve is no longer able, in reality, to continue its multi-decade combat against the « barbarous relic » in order to guarantee the supremacy of the US currency at the centre of the international monetary system. For LEAP/E2020 the decade which has just begun will be clearly marked by a complete collapse of the Dollar (and the fall of most major international currencies) by gold. ... 

The opening last week in Dubai of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building at 2,717 feet, is a physical reminder of an underappreciated risk for 2010: the possibility that countries that rode the debt issuance boom of the mid-2000s will have trouble paying their creditors. (The Philadelphia Inquirer and Britain’s The Independent have also documented the human cost of Dubai’s...