Author: Press Room

By Yasin Ebrahim Investing.com — The dollar jumped on Monday, driving back the wave of bearish bets that recently pushed it to one-year lows as some on Wall Street believe bets on Federal Reserve rate cuts and a soft landing is nearing a crossroads.  The , which measures the greenback against a trade-weighted basket of six major currencies, rose by 0.54% to 101.8, after falling to its lowest level since April 2022 on Friday.  “The market is pricing a fairly narrow path of a small slowdown but more accommodative policy, and we think that is likely to come to a fork…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The European Central Bank needs to keep raising interest rates even if most of its past hikes have yet to feed through to the economy, as rapid price growth was at risk of getting entrenched, German central bank chief Joachim Nagel said on Friday. The ECB has raised rates by at least 50 basis points at each of its past six meetings but policymakers are now debating whether to slow down given financial vulnerabilities. “I do not think that our job is already – or even mostly – done,” Nagel, an influential voice on the ECB’s rate-setting…

Rana Foroohar’s new book Homecoming: The Path To Prosperity in a Post-Global World takes us from warehouses in South San Francisco, to textile factories in North Carolina and data entrepreneurs in Taiwan. What connects the people we meet along the way? They are all working to reconnect wealth with place. And this, according to Foroohar, is what we need to counter the power of both big government and big corporations. As a business columnist for the Financial Times, Foroohar started sensing problems with globalization well before they burst forth these past few years. Her book explains why these problems emerged,…

One of the great ironies of business is that success can breed failure. A company that invents and commercializes a market dominating new service can squelch innovation. The company’s leaders might think: “Why should we sacrifice our golden egg laying goose to push a new product that might not pay off?” Such inaction opens the door for more innovative, faster-moving rivals to surpass the successful incumbents. Consider Google — which has dominated the search engine market for nearly two decades. Suddenly $23 billion worth of its search contracts could potentially go to Microsoft’s Bing, according to the New York Times.…

There are few things worse than a debt collector dinging you for a loan you’ve paid off or discharged. This has been a pronounced problem in the college debt arena. According to a study by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), “When a court orders the discharge of a loan, lenders and servicers should not treat this as a suggestion,” said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra. “The CFPB has found that some servicers are ignoring bankruptcy court orders. The student loan servicing industry should ensure that their collection practices are compliant with the law.” If you’ve ever dealt with a loan…

I kept my swearing to a minimum this tax season. Honestly, that says more about IRS than it does about me. It felt like a different tax season. Last year, the IRS marked a dismal 15% Level of Service to taxpayers. The “Level of Service” is the number you get when you divide the number of taxpayers who reach a live assistor by the number of calls the IRS system routes to live assistors. Remarkably, that 15% only accounted for calls that made it into the queue—calls routed for automated assistance and callers who hang up before they are placed…

The decline in mortgage rates over the last month likely will boost U.S. home sales by more than 200,000 as cheaper financing results in more people qualifying for loans, according to Lawerence Yun, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors. “Each half a percentage point drop in mortgage rates results is an additional 200,000 home sales, and likely even more,” said Yun. “Since more people will qualify for mortgages, it leads to more sales.” The average U.S. rate for a 30-year fixed home loan dropped to 6.28% last week from 6.73% in March’s first week, according to Freddie Mac.…

Confidence among builders in the U.S. housing market increased more than expected in April as declining mortgage rates and low inventory helped drive demand higher for new homes. The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index, which measures the pulse of the single-family housing market, rose one point to 45, the highest reading since September.Despite the increase, the index still points to a slump in the housing sector ahead of the pivotal spring-selling season. Any reading above 50 is considered positive; prior to 2022, the gauge has not entered negative territory since 2012, excluding a brief – but…

Wall Street may be ripping a page out of the post-WWII era. According to RBC Capital Markets’ Lori Calvasina, stocks may be ignoring all signs of a recession. related investing news”If you go all the way back to 1945, that was the recession coming out of World War II, the stock market just marched through it,” the firm’s head of U.S. equity strategy told CNBC’s “Fast Money” on Monday. “It is the only recession where it’s essentially been ignored.”In a research note out this week, Calvasina tackled the S&P 500’s performance during recessions going back to 1937. She found the 1945…

Ford Motor will import its next-generation Lincoln Nautilus from China to the U.S., the company said Monday night.The midsize crossover is currently produced for the U.S. at Ford’s Oakville Assembly Plant in Ontario, Canada. The automaker recently announced it would be investing 1.8 billion Canadian dollars (about $1.3 billion) to transition the facility into a new electric vehicle hub.This marks the first time Lincoln will import a vehicle to the U.S. from China.Importing a vehicle from China to the U.S. is not unprecedented but can draw public and political criticism or backlash, especially when tensions between the two countries are…