Jennifer Johnson is a graduate student at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications. She is specializing in business journalism and is a graduate assistant at the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. She has worked as a freelance writer for the St. Louis Business Journal and West Newsmagazine in St. Louis. She spent last year working as a political assistant at the European Union Parliament in Brussels, Belgium.
A recent Bloomberg news commentary by Celestine Bohlen pointed out some of the skewed facts when media pundits say the U.S. is headed for “Euro-style” socialism. Bohlen wrote that few Europeans consider themselves doomed by their comprehensive health-care plans. Many European countries don’t have government-operated health care, which is the standard definition of socialized medicine. Bohlen [...]
Bloomberg News reported, banks aren’t doing anyone a “favor,” when they charge fees as high as $39 on debit-card transactions that overdraw a consumer’s account, said House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank. The Federal Reserve finally put a halt to these shoddy business practices Thursday. Under the new rules, banks must get consumers’ permission [...]
Hat’s off to The Economist, The New York Times, and a host of other media organizations for their stand-out coverage of the US jobless rate on Friday. The Economist chose a positive spin, and reports that while the US jobless rate has passed 10.2%,economic indicators point to the fact that it should start to bounce back. While economic coverage [...]
Just a day after I had spoken to two Wall Street analysts, US Airways announced its plan to cut 1,000 positions. Both analysts said that because the airline has a reasonable cash position (1.5 billion); it is not in danger of bankruptcy. US Airways executives were cautiously optimistic on their third-quarter conference call six days [...]
In the course of working on a story about U.S. Airways for the Phoenix Business Journal I began calling Wall Street analysts last Tuesday to hear about what they had to say about U.S. Airways and the company’s Phoenix hub. “A lot has been written about the airline industry and their weakened stocks,” said top [...]
CNN and the International Business Times report that General Motors Co is making its first major asset sale, selling a Delaware manufacturing plant to Fisker Automotive, which will make plug-in hybrid electric cars beginning in 2012. Fisker was able to purchase the plant using a $528 dollar loan from Uncle Sam. The plant expects to [...]
A $20 million insider trading scheme run by billionaire Raj Rajaratnam has been halted by federal prosecutors reports Bloomberg. Rajaratnam and five other former Bear Stearns Cos. directors were charged in the scheme. “The defendents operated in a world of, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said at a [...]
The Nobel Prize Economic committee really shook things up this year. Besides nominating U.S. President Barack Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize, the winner for the Nobel Economics Prize, Elinor Ostrom, is a departure from traditional winners. Steven Levitt, the author of “Freakonomics,” writes in his blog Economist View that economists will disapprove of yesterday’s [...]
The U.S. dollar has slid more than 12 percent since its peak this year in March according to Bloomberg. The weaker dollar may boost America’s exports, but leaves America vulnerable to losing foreign creditors. “It is very important to the United States that we continue to have a strong dollar,”said U.S Treasury Secretary Tim Geither. [...]
