PUBLIC MARKS from ravi with tag economics

In recent weeks one part of the debt market after another has buckled. High-risk loans used to finance corporate buyouts have plummeted in value. Securities backed by commercial real estate mortgages and student loans have fallen sharply. Even auction-rate securities, arcane investments usually considered as safe as cash, have stumbled.

Countrywide Financial brags in its ads that “No one can do what Countrywide can” and that “Countrywide can show you the way home.” Wachovia ads feature an “Approved” stamp prominently at the top, and Bank of America says, “Homeownership is the best medicine.”

With the price of oil near record levels, import costs grew in January at the highest annual rate in a quarter century, the Labor Department said. In New York, manufacturing activity fell to its lowest level in five years. And consumers, responding to a national survey, said they felt worse about the economy than any time since the recession era of the early 1990s.

US industrial production rose a meagre 0.1% in January, official figures have shown, the latest indication of weakness in the US economy.

US retail sales rose 0.3% in January official figures show, bolstered by sales of new cars and petrol.

The Bank of England governor, Mervyn King, admitted yesterday that the economy might grind to a halt this year - but warned that the continuing risk of inflation made further interest rate cuts unlikely.

US mortgage insurer MGIC has reported quarterly losses of $1.47bn (£750m) after being hit by the housing slump and resulting high levels of bad debt.

On Wednesday, the first full day of a Wisconsin primary campaign that he hopes will solidify his emerging lead over his once "inevitable" rival, the Illinois senator started in Janesville, where he delivered a rebuke to free-trade policies of the Bill Clinton and George Bush eras that sounded a little like a speech Feingold might have delivered.

The US trade deficit narrowed in 2007, official figures show, as a rise in exports offset the country's large growth in oil imports.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress Thursday that the country's economic outlook has deteriorated and signaled that the central bank is ready to keep on lowering a key interest rate -- as needed -- to shore things up.

The Bush administration’s latest move is to simply hide the data. Forbes has awarded EconomicIndicators.gov one of its “Best of the Web” awards. Yet the Bush administration has decided to shut down this site because of “budgetary constraints,” effective March 1.

The German government is to bail out the troubled IKB bank to the tune of 1 billion euros. It is the second cash injection for IKB, one of the many German casualties of the US subprime crisis.

Like subprime mortgages, many prime loans made in recent years allowed borrowers to pay less initially and face higher adjustable payments a few years later. As long as home prices were rising, these borrowers could refinance their loans or sell their properties to pay off their mortgages. But now, with prices falling and lenders clamping down, homeowners with solid credit are starting to come under the same financial stress as those with subprime credit.

He offered to takeover the insurance of $800bn-worth (£408bn) of local government bonds, currently covered by MBIA, Ambac Financial and FGIC.

The comeback of German manufacturing contradicts the notion that the future belongs to the service industry. Manufacturing firms are currently the engines of growth in the German economy, even for the service sector.

One of the world's best-known CEOs, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, admitted to fellow participants that he had become skeptical of the very notion of capitalism.

India expects its economy to grow by 8.7% in the financial year ending March, the slowest rate of expansion in three years.

The nation's retailers delivered more evidence of a stumbling economy Thursday, as merchants reported their weakest January performance in nearly four decades, extending a malaise that has deepened since the holiday shopping season.

A weak report about the services sector has caused some experts to declare that the economy has already entered downturn.

The US Department of Commerce says the economy grew at an annual rate of just 0.6% from October to December. In the previous three months, between July and September, the economy was growing at annual rate of 4.9%.

The homeownership rate has plunged back to the levels of the summer of 2001.

Even as stocks ended five days of losses with a surprising recovery on Wednesday, officials began moving to defuse another potential time bomb in the markets: the weakened condition of two large insurance companies that have guaranteed buyers against losses on more than $1 trillion of bonds.

Alan Greenspan - the man primarily responsible for the current crisis. Greenspan, always accommodating to the needs of Wall Street, worked on the principle that the best way to cope with the collapse of one bubble was to blow another one.

Bangladeshi microcredit pioneer Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their work in advancing economic and social opportunities for the poor, particularly women.