Scraping together $40 billion in spending cuts in a country already shaved to the bone is a tall order. But try doing it with the lights off while dodging rocks, gas bombs and tear gas and with impatient foreign officials breathing down your neck. Welcome to the Greek debt crisis 2.0. On June 21, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou narrowly skirted political death in a vote of confidence in the Greek Parliament, after weeks of political infighting and escalating protests against ...

"I'm very, very sorry to say that my business is skyrocketing," the personal-finance guru Suze Orman said one late January afternoon. The Dow was down almost 200 points, and Orman was lounging on the terrace of her San Francisco town house, wearing a leopard-print tunic and cowboy boots. She looked up and popped a grape into her mouth. "This is happening because of the lies and deceit and greed of Wall Street, the mortgage companies, the SEC, the Administration," she ...

A few weeks back, at an event to celebrate the role of women in finance, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner tried to get things started with a joke. He said he had recently come across a headline that asked, "What If Women Ran Wall Street?" "Now that's an excellent question, but it's kind of a low bar," Geithner continued, deadpan amid rising laughter. "How, you might ask, could women not have done better?" It is rarely noted that the financial ...

For Portugal, the news just gets worse and worse. Markets had been circling the debt-ridden, growth-resistant country since last summer, pushing up borrowing costs in anticipation of a default. Last month, the center-left government of Prime Minister Jos Scrates collapsed after it failed to secure parliamentary backing for a raft of spending cuts and tax hikes. Last week, after long denying it needed any help, Scrates' outgoing administration admitted defeat and sought a European Union bailout. And ...

Personal-finance guru Suze Orman is famous for her no-holds-barred advice. And in her latest book, The Money Class , she urges recession-battered Americans to be just as honest with themselves. Says Orman, whose past eight books have all been New York Times best sellers: "The whole purpose of this book is to learn how to create a new American dream, a dream that is based in reality, not fantasy." TIME spoke with Orman about credit cards, student loans and the death ...

There is candid frustration Thursday coming from rank and file congressional Democrats about the influence of Maine's Republican senator in the health care reform debate. The way Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe sees it, she's just using the power any senator has: the power of one. "The brilliance of our Founding Fathers was this: that they gave power equally to every member of the United States Senate, whether you represented a large state or a small state, and exercising that authority ...

Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe has served in Congress for more than 30 years, but in recent months, she's become one of the most-watched lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Her colleagues on both sides of the aisle have courted her vote and anxiously waited to see whether she'd cross party lines on the health care legislation moving through the Senate. On Tuesday, the Maine senator became the only Republican to vote in support of the Senate Finance Committee's 10-year, $829 billion ...

After months of lending its cautious, very qualified support to health-care reform, the health insurance industry has lobbed its first bomb at the Democrats' proposals. But many of the industry's assertions appear to have missed their mark. ...

Former Japanese Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa, who resigned from his post after appearing intoxicated at a news conference earlier this year, was found dead in his home Sunday, police told CNN. Tokyo police found Nakagawa, 56, lying face down on a bed on the second-floor of his home, Kyodo reported. Nakagawa submitted his resignation February 17, just three days after he appeared intoxicated at the G7 news conference in Rome, Italy. Japan's prime minister quickly appointed Kaoru Yosano, the economics ...

As lawmakers huddled this summer to put together the framework for health care legislation, it quickly became evident that the battle over President Obama's top priority would be neither quick nor easy. After months of debate and missed deadlines, the public option has emerged as the main sticking point. From the beginning, some Democrats said they wouldn't pass a bill without a government-sponsored, public option, while other Democrats and most Republicans said they'd say no to any plan ...