"They own. you know, the banks in this country, the newspapers. Just look at where the Jewish money is." That heedless remark, evoking the cliches of hoary antiSemitism, was the worst-aimed bomb of four-star Air Force General George S. Brown's 33-year military career. When it exploded last week, President Ford called Brown, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, into the Oval Office for a ten-minute reprimand. New York Republican Senator Jacob Javits demanded an investigation. Democratic Senator William ...

Somehow, it fell to the United States to censure an Israeli shipping company for doing business with Iran. Last month the State Department sanctioned the Ofer Brothers Group, a private company based in the tony beach city of Herzliya, for selling an $8.6 million tanker to Iran through a known Iranian front company based in Monaco. The May 24 order barred the Israeli firm, along with a subsidiary based in Singapore, from obtaining export licenses, private loans ...

As the crisis in Syria continues, many observers are beginning to say that if the protesters cannot overthrow the regime, the economy will. With political uncertainty at a suffocating level, the Syrian pound has fallen against the U.S. dollar. As a result, Syrians are feverishly hauling their money out of banks — about 8% of all banks deposits have been withdrawn — and shifting it into more stable foreign currencies. GDP was predicted to grow at a ...

For decades the folks at Visa and MasterCard have been slobbering over the prospect of a cashless society, and they're getting their wish. Debit transactions surpassed credit in 2003 and continue to grow twice as fast. Today you can use debit cards to pay for anything from a Subway sandwich to a safari--which I did last June in Africa. Cash is easy to lose; it's a target for criminals; it's dirty--and yet the feds frown on laundering it. Cashless is ...

Dubai's financial crisis may have calmed a bit now that the central bank of the United Arab Emirates has promised to stand behind the city state's banks with fresh liquidity. After all, the UAE, to which Dubai belongs, has perhaps $700 billion accumulated from petroleum riches — a resource that Dubai, which is apparently stuck with tens of billions of dollars in debt, does not enjoy. But the question remains, if the central bank in Abu Dhabi decides ...

Bank of England Governor Mervyn King this week launched a scathing attack on Britain's banking sector, calling for a break-up of behemoth financial institutions that have taken billions of public money to stay afloat. King says Britain's Main Street banks should be separated from their risky investment arms to dissolve a culture in which some banks can fall back on the knowledge that they are "too important to fail" and thus can keep gambling with vast amounts of public cash. ...

King says Britain's Main Street banks should be separated from their risky investment arms to dissolve a culture in which some banks can fall back on the knowledge that they are "too important to fail" and thus can keep gambling with vast amounts of public cash. The governor's comments come as leading financial houses -- including recipients of taxpayer-funded bailouts -- prepare to pay out large bonuses, angering many who fear this signals a return to pre-economic crisis rewards ...

Three days after the Reserve Bank of Australia unexpectedly raised interest rates, the monetary policy committee of South Korea's central bank held a meeting. The Oct. 9 gathering was closely followed because the Australian move raised expectations that other central banks will also tighten. Korea held the line. Citing "uncertainty as to the economic growth path," the Bank of Korea kept interest rates at an ultra-low 2%, the result of six rate cuts over the past year. ...

Hey Morgan Stanley, dost thou protest too much? The financial firm was the first to announce this week that it was among the ten banks approved to repay $68 billion in rescue money the companies had received from the Treasury Department last October. Since then, executives of Morgan have said that they thought the Stress Test was "appropriate" and that the financial crisis has bottomed. ...

Now that the bank stress tests are completed, is it time to plan another round? The government's bank exams, the results of which were released last Thursday, seem to have calmed the market and paved the way for the nation's largest financial firms to raise tens of billion of dollars. As a result, a number of academics and policy watchers are warming to the idea of making the stress tests permanent. They like the fact that the stress tests ...