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. ...

"Buy Local"—you see the decal in the store window, the sign at the farmer's market, the bright, cheerful logos for Local First Arizona, Think Boise First, Our Milwaukee, and homegrown versions across the states. The apparent message is "let's-support-local-business", a kind of community boosterism. But buying close to home may be more than a feel-good, it's-worth-paying-more-for-local matter. A number of researchers and organizations are taking a closer look at how money flows, and what they're finding shows the profound ...

If you prefer to keep the image of meat — say, a juicy hamburger — safely separated from the image of an actual animal — say, a 1,200-lb. castrated bull — then cow-pooling is not for you. Jean Edwards is clearly not squeamish about knowing precisely where her steaks come from. In 2007, she and her husband James, a corrections officer in Vermont, went in with another family to buy a side of grass-fed beef directly from a farmer. ...

Americans are spending less; no surprise there. Figures out this week from the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis show that in April overall consumer spending was down 0.1% from the month before. People are now saving 5.7% of their disposable income, the most since 1995 and a cosmic increase from the zero-savings days of just a few years ago. Yet those numbers are far from the whole story. People aren't cutting back equally in all ...

So here's a bit of counterconventional wisdom: The only person who has consistently been right about the disastrous AOL–Time Warner merger was its architect, Steve Case. I pause here to duck the shoes being hurled by my co-workers ... But it's true. Consider: Merging AOL with Time Warner in 2000 could have and should have been a brilliant move, not just for Case, who made zillions by converting high-flying Internet stock into real money, but for the world's ...

British Airways posted the airline's worst annual loss since its privatization in 1987 as its chief executive declared there were "absolutely no signs of recovery" in the industry. The airline slumped from profit to loss in the last financial year. During the year ended March 31, its operating loss swelled to £220 million ($348 million) from a restated profit of £878 million ($1.4 billion) in 2008. "I'm 30 years in this business and I've never seen anything ...

The economy is losing between 600,000 and 750,000 jobs every month by every measure that the government and analysts use. This rate of job losses may go on for a relatively long period. This trend can cause people to believe that trying to find a job is hopeless and that the tidal wave of the recession will overflow the financial mooring of every person who has ever worked or may want to work again. But, job ...

At last month's glitzy Shanghai auto show, held in the only significant car market in the world that's still growing, Nick Reilly, the president of GM Asia-Pacific, knew the question would come. Still, he winced a bit when a Chinese journalist asked him what would happen to Detroit's fallen giant if it was forced by the U.S. government to declare bankruptcy. "In China, bankruptcy means you're out of business," the journalist noted. "Finished." Reilly, who has heard this a lot ...

We know a fair amount about South Africa's new President as a man. Jacob Zuma has six wives and 19 children, and he has been tried for rape and corruption . His party, the African National Congress, sells him as an affable consensus-builder and a champion of the dispossessed — and on both counts, it's true, he scores. But we know very little about him as a policy-maker. Zuma has consistently refused to answer questions of policy, describing himself ...

If you want to stare deep into the crater of the world economy, look at the largest public company listings over the past year. By May 2008, a U.S. credit card giant and a Chinese national railroad company raised a combined $25.4 billion in their initial public offerings. The two largest IPOs so far this year A U.S. baby formula maker and a Chinese aluminum manufacturer, together raising about $2 billion. Gone are the days of high-tech or high-finance companies ...