Daniel Indiviglio's Slant

Uncle Sam has been aggressively increasing Americans' allowance recently. Government entitlement programs have grown to account for 35% of wages, according to a new analysis by Madeline Schnapp, director of macroeconomic research at investment research firm TrimTabs. The magnitude of government assi ..

Small businesses aren't thriving, but they are feeling about as optimistic as they were heading into the recession. The National Federation of Independent Business' Optimism Index (.pdf) rose again in February to 94.5 from 94.1 in January. That's not a huge gain, but it virtually matches December 20 ..

On Wednesday, we learned that the median sale price of an existing home fell to a level not seen since April 2002. The National Association of Realtors blamed recent price declines on deep discounts on rising distressed property sales, rather home values falling broadly. Today, we can begin to test ..

The Federal Reserve's November credit expansion policy, meant to increase inflation, may be working. In January, for the second month straight, the consumer price index grew by 0.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But more importantly, core CPI, which excludes food and energy, ticked u ..

The bad weather didn't keep all Americans from shopping in January. U.S. sales for retail and food services rose for the seventh month straight to $381.6 billion, according to the Census Bureau. That's a 0.3% increase compared to December, and a 7.8% jump from a year earlier. It also set a new high, ..

As the debate on housing finance policy continues to heat up, another proposal has entered the picture. While the two extreme ends of the spectrum are those generally being discussed -- the government leaving the market entirely or it backing the market entirely -- there's another possibility. A hyb ..

If you've met many people who work on Wall Street, then you've probably noticed a trend: almost all of them come from colleges like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Penn. Super-elite schools account for the vast majority of hires at big banks. A new paper by Kellogg management professor Lauren Rivera e ..

For a few years now, we've been hearing about the government's mortgage modification program ("HAMP"), but it hasn't been clear who, in particular, is benefiting. Although the program hasn't come near the goals it sought -- to prevent a few million foreclosures -- over a half million Americans have ..

Anyone over the age of 25-years-old probably remembers the stigma that once surrounded cars that ran on anything other than gasoline. As recently as the 1990s, people used to scoff at the idea of driving electric cars. They were glorified golf carts, some people complained. But as technology is impr ..

Who better to explain why firms aren't hiring than the nation's largest business federation? How to create jobs was a central focus of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's State of American Business address today, given by its President and CEO Thomas J. Donohue. It's 2011 outlook was on the optimistic en ..

Wall Street banks weren't the only ones who had a pretty good 2010: the U.S. central banks also made a boatload of money. The Federal Reserve announced today that its net income was $80.9 billion in 2010. That's 51.5% better than its healthy 2009 profit of $53.4 billion. And there's good news for ta ..

In 2009, after the residential mortgage market had pretty clearly collapsed, people began worrying about commercial mortgages. Although bad subprime mortgages were responsible for popping the housing bubble, it continued to rapidly deflate when prime mortgages also began to default as the recession ..

Democrats' proudest moment in 2010 was when they passed the health care reform bill. If not for that legislation, the summer's gigantic financial regulation package probably would have been their most major accomplishment. Of course, each is as controversial as it is significant. As a result, we're ..

Banks are finally beginning to lend, the big ones that is. Commercial and industrial lending is up this quarter 0.2% from the third quarter, according to Moody's Analytics. That might not sound like much, but it's the first quarterly increase in two years. This is great, right? After all, if banks a ..

Home prices have begun to fall again. The most recent report showing the housing market's decline came on Tuesday when the October data for the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index was released. It indicated that in many areas, home prices have been falling since July. That's after prices appeared to ..