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... 

Some members of Congress made risky bets with their own money that U.S. stocks or bonds would fall during the financial crisis, a Wall Street Journal analysis of congressional disclosures shows. Senators have criticized Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS – News) for profiting from the housing collapse. And Congress is considering legislation to curb Wall Street risk-taking, including the use... 

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,... 

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,... 

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... 

The signs are everywhere that oil is headed for stratospheric highs – $200, $250 or even $300 a barrel. Some of these signs are just plain obvious. But even the subtle indicators are telling us that some very expensive energy costs headed our way. Let me tell you about one such indicator that I came across over the New Year holiday. A tiny news item said that Saudi Arabian oil concern Aramco is abandoning... 

As many Americans begin to realize that it will be many years (if not decades) before their houses are worth what they owe on them, the idea of walking away from your mortgage is going mainstream. Not surprisingly, the mortgage industry is doing everything it can to prevent this, including telling homeowners that they have a “moral obligation” to pay. But do they? Is it okay to walk away... 

The feast of cheap and limitless liquidity could not avoid interfering with the international currency market. While in the first six months of the year the crisis was beneficial for the US dollar, in the second half of the year speculators took it out on the dollar over and above. This year is expected to continue weakening of the American currency that dropped to the level of $1.6 for one Euro in...