Financial Crisis

The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit, an effort that officials say will help power the economic recovery but that skeptics say could open the door to the risky lending that caused the housing crash in the first place. President Obama's economic advisers and outside experts say the nation's much-celebrated housing rebound is leaving too many people behind , including young people looking to buy their first homes and...

Alexis Goldstein worked on Wall Street for seven years and is now an Occupy Wall Street activist. When it comes to helping Wall Street lobbyists gut reforms passed in the wake of the financial crisis, there is often very little difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. Recent votes in the House Financial Services Committee demonstrated this bipartisanship all too well. Last month, the committee considered H.R. 1256, the Swaps Jurisdiction Certainty Act , which garnered a "Yea" from every single Republican and a...

LONDON — On a humid late spring evening, women from across north London descended upon a Victorian pub in the eclectic neighborhood of Camden for a secret meeting. Each slipped inside cradling a package under one arm. They weren't there for a pint, though. They'd come for cake and to share the keys to its creation. Long home to edgy worlds of music and art, urban Britain can now claim one more underground scene: baking. The Clandestine Cake Club , a hush-hush society for baking enthusiasts, has become wildly popular here.

LONDON — On a humid late spring evening, women from across north London descended upon a Victorian pub in the eclectic neighborhood of Camden for a secret meeting. Each slipped inside cradling a package under one arm. They weren't there for a pint, though. They'd come for cake and to share the keys to its creation. Long home to edgy worlds of music and art, urban Britain can now claim one more underground scene: baking. The Clandestine Cake Club , a hush-hush society for baking enthusiasts, has become wildly popular here.

If you were to ask most people the names of the firms at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis, you'd probably hear Lehman Brothers , AIG and the favorites among right-wing conservatives, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. A few cognoscenti might conjure up Bear Stearns , Merrill Lynch, Countrywide or New Century Financial. At the top of the list for left-wing conspiracy theorists would surely be Goldman Sachs . What's interesting about that list is that none of those institutions was a...

STOCKHOLM — Almost every developed nation in the world was walloped by the financial crisis, their economies paralyzed, their prospects for the future muddied. And then there's Sweden, the rock star of the recovery. This Scandinavian nation of 9 million people has accomplished what the United States, Britain and Japan can only dream of: Growing rapidly, creating jobs and gaining a competitive edge. The banks are lending, the housing market booming. The budget is balanced. Sweden was...

Whoever is inaugurated as president Jan. 20 will, in the first year of his term, face a decision that will have a greater impact on the economy than any other single call he will make: Whom to select as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Ben S. Bernanke's term ends Jan. 31, 2014, about a year after the president takes office; if the past is a guide, and given the sluggishness of the Senate confirmation process, a nomination should happen by Labor Day. That leaves a potential...

It has been less than three years since the global financial system nearly imploded, and even now much of the global economy has not fully recovered. Which makes it all the more shocking that a collective amnesia has already set in about what we've just been through and why it happened. Having succeeded in beating back the more radical ideas for limiting its size, its pay and its speculative excess, the financial services industry is now waging a campaign to undermine what is left of the reform process.

What the U.S. government has spent, lent and pledged: Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) · Congress pledged $700 billion to rescue the financial system. Other Federal Bailouts · In addition, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve have committed $200 billion to shore up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, $152 billion for AIG and $29 billion to Bear Stearns. Federal Reserve Loans · The Fed had $893 billion in loans outstanding last week to financial institutions and others.

MADRID — The newest Apple store in Spain, like its counterparts in other parts of the world, is designed to draw you in. Stone floors, glass doors, and rows of blond wood tables stocked with scores of gleaming iPhones, iPads and MacBooks as far as the eye can see. On a recent weekday afternoon, the cavernous showroom was missing only one thing: customers. Only a handful were scattered throughout the store — and most were just browsing. "I would have liked to buy lots of things, but I have no money," sighed...

Almost a century ago, Thomas Marshall, Woodrow Wilson's vice president, got tired of listening to senators blather on about the nation's needs and uttered the words that made him immortal: "What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar. " Today, with 24/7 blathering as our national political pastime, let me adapt Marshall's 1917 remark: What this country needs to get its act together is a good five-alarm financial crisis. I mean, look around. Except for the Federal Reserve, which has consistently...

The International Monetary Fund recently held a conference that should concern most people despite its arcane subject — " Rethinking Macro Policy II . " Macroeconomics is the study of the entire economy, as opposed to the examination of individual markets ("microeconomics"). The question is how much "macro" policies can produce and protect prosperity. Before the 2008-09 financial crisis, there was great confidence that they could. Now, with 38 million unemployed in Europe and the United States — and recoveries that are feeble...

Columnist, The Washington Post Neil Irwin is a Washington Post columnist and the economics editor of Wonkblog, The Post's site for policy news and analysis. Each weekday morning his Econ Agenda column reports and explains the latest trends in economics, finance, and the policies that shape both. He is the author of  "The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire,"  a book about the efforts of the world's central banks to combat the financial crisis and its aftermath, to be published in spring 2013 by the Penguin Press.

RNS () — With the help of pagans, Jains and people of a range of other faiths, the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions has raised more than $144,000 in two weeks using a crowdsourcing campaign in a desperate bid to survive a financial crisis. The Chicago-based interfaith network was recently ordered by a U.S. court to pay $276,000 in expenses related to its 2004 meeting in Barcelona, Spain. Deadly train bombings in Madrid months beforehand prompted a drop in expected attendance.

BERLIN — Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble on Tuesday played down differences in their views on whether to focus more on growth or austerity in lifting Europe's economy, but deep divides between the two remained. On the second day of his trip to Europe, Lew met with Schaeuble, the architect of Germany's response to the financial crisis buffeting the continent, and argued that more must be done to encourage economic growth. Germany...

Is Washington likely to break up the country's biggest banks? No, not right now. But perhaps soon. Political momentum for dismantling them has been, in recent weeks, overstated. That unanimous vote in the Senate for a budget amendment critical of big banks? It was a nonbinding amendment to end "too-big-to-fail subsidies. " As it happens, there isn't a line item in the federal budget titled "too-big-to-fail subsidies. " The vote was a freebie against the abstract concept of taxpayers subsidizing Wall...

Bitcoin, the digital currency maintained by no national government or corporation but only by an online community that envisions it as the international, democratic future of money , has increased sharply in value over the past few weeks: In the United States, this mysterious money has become the darling of antigovernment libertarians and computer wizards prospecting in the virtual mines of cyberspace. In Europe, meanwhile, it has found its niche as the coinage of anarchic youth . . .

Neil Irwin is the author of "The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire," He is a Washington Post columnist and editor of Wonkblog . You knew something had gone horribly awry with the way the world works when traders, financial journalists and officials who track economic policy focund themselves obsessing over a vote in the Slovenian parliament. It was late September 2011, and Europe was in a particularly dark phase of its crisis. The governments that use the euro currency had to...