Louise Story

New York Attorney General and Governor-elect Andrew Cuomo has brought a civil suit against former "Car Czar" Steven Rattner, accusing him of fraud in an attempt to win hundreds of millions in investments from the New York State pension system. Cuomo says he's continuing an investigation into possible criminal activity by Rattner, who has just agreed to pay $6.2 million to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to settle a separate civil lawsuit.

After unexpectedly strong interest from potential investors made itself apparent, formerly-bankrupt carmaker GM raised its initial price on last night's stock offering to $33/share. This morning, the auto giant helped start off the NYSE with a Comaro's horn. Selling at $33/share should potentially net GM more than $23 billion, and allow it to pay back half of the money still owed taxpayers and the Treasury Department after last year's automaker bailout.

After Greece's financial bailout by the European Union earlier this year, Ireland and Portugal could be next. Why? In part, because the European Union's economically stronger countries are sometimes obliged to take care of the economically weak, so a feared economic downturn doesn't spread. But when countries like Ireland and Portugal ask for help, there's an immediate problem: Their own interests don't necessarily align with the interests of the countries bailing them out.  

Louise Story, Wall Street and finance reporter for The New York Times, has the latest in this potential economic rescue.

Yesterday, Britain’s government announced a plan to more closely monitor its financial services firms, including large investment banking companies. Their financial watchdog arm, called the Financial Services Authority, is going to start recording the cell phone conversations of investment bankers to try and cut down on fraud and insider trading.

The G20 Summit started earlier today in Seoul, South Korea, and high among the story lines we're watching is the economic skirmishing between China and the U.S. The U.S. has long been critical of how China has dealt with its currency, accusing China's central banks with keeping the RMB artificially low. China and other countries, meanwhile, are not happy with some of the White House's fiscal policies, most recently the Fed's plan to pump $600 billion back into the sluggish U.S. economy.

Will the cost of our national debt drop soon as a result of the recently passed banking reform? And will that change the political debate in Washington over raising our debt ceiling?

Now that the midterm elections are over, the shakeup in Congressional committees are about to begin. Republicans have made it clear that when they take control of the House this January, they'll be targeting several key pieces of President Obama's agenda to roll back. A number of Republicans ran on repealing the president's health care reform legislation, but far fewer of them have talked about their desire to repeal the sweeping financial regulation bill passed earlier this year. Louise Story, business and finance reporter for The New York Times, explains what this means for President Obama and consumers.

The Federal Reserve Bank announced Wednesday that it will once again make a large purchase of Treasury Bonds — $600 billlion worth — as part of a Quantitative Easing to help the struggling economy. The response of many to this news: "Quantitative what?" Louise Story, Wall Street and Finance Reporter for our partner The New York Times, joins the show to break it down.

Shares of financial companies dropped yesterday on concerns about how reviews of home-foreclosure practices will affect their balance sheets. Louise Story, Wall Street and finance reporter for our partner, The New York Times, has been looking at analyses of how hard the blow may be for banks, and how long it might last.

The September jobs report comes out today; this month's report carries some special weight. For politicians, it's the last unemployment report Americans will hear about before the mid-term elections. For the Federal Reserve, it will affect policy when the it meets in November; many expect a loosening of monetary policy based on how the economy is faring.

Overall though, economists are predicting the September report will not show too much change in unemployment figures. Businesses are still slow to hire, but layoffs are not rising. There may not be much in the way of job growth, and many, many Americans are still unemployed, but fewer people are losing their jobs.

New York Times finance reporter Louise Story breaks down Timothy Geithner's speech on monetary policy at the Brookings Institution and explains a new House bill that could allow trade sanctions on China based on the artificially low value of the Chinese RMB.

Under the unpopular bank bailout program, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, better known as TARP, the government invested money in struggling banks, and eventually got something in return. But the program's end got Louise Story, Wall Street and finance reporter for our partner The New York Times, thinking about whether the big banks got a better deal than the government did, when everything was said and done.

Is it income or material possessions? Is it the ability to have a parent raise their children as opposed to a nanny or daycare? Is it being a homeowner or owning your vehicle? Is it a state of mind? These are some of your answers to the question we posed yesterday: What signifies middle class to you?

Today, one of the greatest screen villains of the past quarter century returns in “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.”

This time, Gordon Gekko, again played by Michael Douglas, returns to the investment banking world just in time to see it crash and burn ... and of course, in time to benefit from it crashing and burning.

But while some fans of Gekko and "Wall Street" are thrilled with the prospect of a sequel, we’re more interested in knowing whether the movie is good, the facts accurate, and what we might learn from it.

Rafer and Kristen (and special guest New York Times Wall Street and finance reporter Louise Story) discuss "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps."

Stocks surged on Monday, following an announcement from the National Bureau for Economic Research that the recession has been over since June of 2009. 

You can be forgiven if this comes as news to you — it's come as news to many people, not least the small business owners who've been struggling to survive in an economy where credit is tight, health care costs are high, and consumers and investors remain skittish.

The Census Bureau will release its annual Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage report today and the expectations are grim.

Former Lehman Brothers chief executive Richard Fuld testified before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on Wednesday. He described his frustration that his firm did not get the help that other firms later got from federal regulators. Louise Story, Wall Street and finance reporter for The New York Times, explains what we're learning from the FCIC, which is tasked with finding out what caused the financial and economic crisis in 2008.

A small group of economists are trying to study whether income inequality may have contributed to the economic collapse. The income gap in the years leading up to the recent recession, which is often compared to the Great Depression, has a striking resemblance to the income equality in 1928, when the top 10 percent of earners received nearly half of the total income. Finance reporter Louise Story wrote about this theory for The New York Times earlier in August, and we spoke with her about the income gap on The Takeaway last week.

There's long been a growing gap between the rich and the poor in the United States, but some believe that disparity could actually cause more harm than previously thought. A group of economists, sociologists, and legal scholars are saying there may be a correlation between income inequality and financial crises. One possible link between the two, according to David A. Moss, an economic and policy historian at the Harvard Business School could be the fact that Wall Street titans wield power that, in turn, allows them to promote policies which benefit them, but not necessarily the financial system as a whole.