Economic Glance
Corporate insiders are now selling their companies’ stock at a rate not seen since late last July.
That’s a scary parallel indeed, since that late-July spike in selling came just days before one of the more painful two-week periods in the stock market in years.
Making these recent readings even more worrisome, according to Argus Research, is that they came on markedly stepped-up activity among corporate insiders. This increases our confidence that the ratio accurately reflects prevailing sentiment among a broad cross-section of the insiders.
The biggest U.S. banks will provide about $25 billion in relief to distressed homeowners, as state and federal officials hold lenders responsible for taking illegal shortcuts during foreclosures and for other deceptive practices.
About 610,000 U.S. bank customers switched to a smaller institution in the last three months of 2011 to protest plans by major banks to impose monthly charges for using debit cards, according to a financial services market-research firm.
The customer attempting to pay his mortgage, firefighter Robert Somerton, recorded the ordeal in Lakeport branch which made the bank manager so upset that he called the police. The police detained Somerton for a half hour before releasing him with a warning that he may never return to that BoA branch or he'll be arrested.
New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman on Friday sued three major U.S. banks, accusing them of fraud for using an electronic mortgage database that resulted in deceptive and illegal practices.
Caterpillar reported a 36 per cent increase in after-tax profit for both the fourth quarter of 2011 and the full year 2011. Revenues for the year increased four per cent to $2.65 billion.
Even as the Securities and Exchange Commission has stepped up its investigations of Wall Street in the last decade, the agency has repeatedly allowed the biggest firms to avoid punishments specifically meant to apply to fraud cases.
