General Motors Corp. may no longer be the world's biggest automaker, but it still operates the country's largest pension fund. The threat to its pension plans has always been an issue, butit took on a new urgency when GM disclosed April 7 that its plans were underfunded by more than $27 billion, with more than half of that being owed to U.S. workers and retirees. Across town, a post- bankrupt Chrysler faces its own pension shortfall. ...

On Oct. 3, Fareed Zakaria spoke to Premier Wen Jiabao on his CNN program Fareed Zakaria GPS. Excerpts: Do you feel that the global economy is stable and strong? Or do you worry that the U.S. could go back into a recession? I think the world economy is recovering, although the process of recovery is a slow and torturous one. I hope that there will be a quick recovery of the U.S. economy, because, after all, the U.S. economy ...

It cost him billions and nearly caused a panic It had to be a Texan, of course. Who else could head a small investment group that loses $1 billion on paper in a single day and still has perhaps $2 billion left after that? A Saudi, maybe, and in fact there were three Saudi Arabian colleagues plus a Brazilian. But their leader, the man who shook the world's commodities markets and almost caused a financial panic last week, is an ...

On April 20, Major League Baseball took control of the Los Angeles Dodgers, a team whose overleveraged owner is going through a humiliating public divorce and steering the franchise towards bankruptcy. The Dodgers' financial situation had been so dire that last week Frank McCourt, who is fighting for ownership of the team with his estranged wife, Jamie, needed a $30 million loan from Fox, the team's television partner, to make payroll. That's right, the Dodgers, one of ...

The Great Recession turned out to be quite good at keeping troubled unions together. Divorce rates fell every year in America during the economic downturn. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which tracks marriage statistics, there were 63,550 fewer divorces in America in 2009 than there were in 2006. Numbers aren't out for 2010, but divorce lawyers and marriage counselors say 2010 was likely the first year since the financial crisis that more couples ...

Appropriately, the race to become the next governor of the richest state in the Union could well be a treatment for a Hollywood script: a multimillionaire taking on the wily scion of a political dynasty to succeed one of the biggest box-office stars of all time as governor of California. On Tuesday, Californians will decide if Democrat Jerry Brown, the current attorney general, a former governor himself and three-time presidential candidate, or Meg Whitman, the eBay ...

Since the end of World War II, the U.S. dollar has enjoyed a unique and powerful position in international trade. But perhaps no more. Before boarding a plane on Saturday to meet President George W. Bush, French President Nicolas Sarkozy proclaimed, "Europe wants it. Europe demands it. Europe will get it." The "it" here is global financial reform, and evidently Sarkozy won't have to wait long. Just hours after their closed-door meeting had finished, Bush and Sarkozy, along ...

Staring out from their photographs, they are the archetypal tycoons: one a steely-eyed Scot with a spade-shaped white beard; another a craggy, Ichabod Crane look-alike; the third a fat cat in striped pants with a watch chain strung across an ample paunch. Today they have the look of fossilized reactionaries, but these turn-of-the-century titans were men who lived in booming, anarchic times and thrived on them. The Gilded Age was a turbulent period of unfettered capitalism and unfathomable wealth ...

At ByDesign Financial Solutions, a debt-counseling service in Modesto, Calif., they're working overtime these days. "Our call volume went up 97% in the past five weeks, which has left us scrambling," says Martha Lucey, president of the nonprofit agency. "[The callers] are close to the max on their credit cards, and they just can't figure out how to manage. We've seen credit-card companies decreasing lines of credit, and the [debtors] don't have any room left. They just ...

Ever wonder how investment bankers, a breed known in the past more for its social skills and golf handicaps than for its mathematical prowess, ever invented products like those crazily sophisticated, synthetic collateralized debt obligations that brought down the financial system? Well, they didn't. They hired rocket scientists to do that--a whole lot of them. In fact, Wall Street hires more math, engineering and science graduates than the semiconductor industry, Big Pharma or the telecommunications business. As one mathematician-turned-trader friend ...