Economic Edge
Early this morning, a powerful 6.1 magnitude aftershock struck Haiti, just over a week after last Tuesday’s earthquake devastated the already poverty-stricken country. Rescue crews continue searching for survivors among the rubble, but the world’s attention has turned from saving lives to...
The fate of the U.S. economy has hinged on a lot of mortgage-related news. There’s loan modifications, refinancing and foreclosure prevention. But one topic that can often help families more than any other, has gotten little attention: short sales.
You may or may not know that a short...
Usually, I toss out the tiny-print letters I get from my credit card company after barely glancing through them. It's always the inside-baseball kind of stuff that I'm pretty sure matters only to the banks--how they're now using a "Foreign Transaction fee" instead of the "Foreign...
Across California, people are falling behind on their gas and electric bills. And last year, the numbers of shut-offs sky-rocketed, especially in Pacific Gas and Electric’s service area.
Is it the result of the recession? Or are utility companies at fault for these shut-offs, too?...
Development in Bay Area cities seems to have stalled. It’s hard to know where the next boom might come from—high tech? Green energy? Cupcakes?
We thought it might be helpful to speak with someone who has a clue, so we called on Sean Randolph, president of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute...
As you’ve probably heard, this is not the best economic climate for commercial real estate development. Even in the Bay Area city of Emeryville, one of the friendliest places around for developers, the pace of building has slowed.
A second phase of the prominent Bay Street shopping center has been...
David Lazarus writes in the LA Times about how new laws that require banks to behave more transparently--like actually notifying people in advance when their credit card fees or APR are about to change--are spurring a bank backlash. Lazarus says these modest changes are expected to cost banks some...
Several news outlets kicked off the new year today with a look at jobs in the new decade.
ABC News offers a general economic outlook, reporting a consensus that 2010 will be another year of high unemployment. They include that the Federal Reserve forecasts an unemployment rate between 9...
As many of us prepare holiday meals this holiday season, we may consider that there are countless families going hungry. David Bacon wrote in the East Bay Express last month that the families in food pantry lines in Oakland are a diverse crowd, representative of Oakland's multicultural...
We’ve heard plenty about banks that are too big to fail. Could there also be community organizations that are too big to fail? The Economic Opportunity Council of San Francisco is one very large non-profit agency with big problems. The EOC, as it’s called, provides childcare and other vital...
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