What you always wanted to know abotu economics but never dared to ask.

Inheritance is a civil right and not a natural right. Way back in 1898, the Supreme Court ruled that the right to take property by devise or descent is the creature of the law and not a natural right. The government had the absolute right to decide as to the terms upon which a person [...]

In an attempt to resolve the present credit crisis, the United States government has taken many steps. Since September, it placed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants under conservatorship, taken a majority stake in the American International Group and passed a $700 billion rescue package for the financial sector. The Treasury [...]

Many wealthy Americans have been using offshore services provided by foreign banks to evade tax. Things may now get a little difficult.
Until now foreign banks could funnel hundreds of billions of dollars overseas on behalf of American clients without disclosing their names to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) under a program known as qualified [...]

More than 20 countries have set up sovereign wealth funds while a dozen more have expressed interest in establishing them. Many of these sovereign wealth funds are picking up stakes in U.S. companies, which is raising concerns about the need for regulating them. Up until the $700 billion bailout, which effectively is a U.S. [...]

A year long probe by Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations which relied on internal bank documents and emails has found that some of the nation’s biggest investment banks and brokerage firms including Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch & Co marketed allegedly abusive transactions that helped foreign hedge fund investments avoid withholding taxes [...]

An auction rate security generally refers to a debt instrument with a long-term nominal maturity for which the interest rate is regularly reset through periodic auctions. It allows issuers to borrow for the long-term but at lower, short-term interest rates.
The auction-rate securities market involved investors buying and selling instruments that resembled corporate debt whose interest rates were reset at regular [...]

The high-profile advertising partnership between Google and Yahoo announced in June after merger talks between Microsoft and Yahoo collapsed could run into a challenge from the U.S. Justice Department. The Association of National Advertisers, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, and the International Advertising Association have expressed concerns about the deal and asked the Justice Department [...]

In recent history, governments have nationalized banks when the pressures of internationalized financial markets and international competition have made it difficult for them to control and stabilize their finances and currency. During the last couple of decades, countries as different as Mexico, France, Sweden, and Japan carried out partial or more or less complete bank [...]

On September 19, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) abruptly banned short sales of financial stocks to protect companies that had come under siege in the stock market. There have been concerns that short sales are behind the big price slides in the market. Many felt that short sellers had contributed to the [...]