What’s stopping small businesses from hiring? One popular story line of the recession is that small businesses, which employ about half the workforce, are afraid to hire because they don’t know what health-care reform and tax changes will mean. Based on that narrative, some stock market observers predict that the November [ Read More → ]

NEW YORK — The developers planning to build a $100 million Islamic center near the World Trade Center site still have financial hurdles to clear: They haven’t finished buying all the property they want for the project and are nearly a quarter-million dollars behind on real estate taxes and late [ Read More → ]

The New Zealand economy feels a lot like a ‘Zombie Nation’ that wants to keep extending the loans and pretending that eventually everything will eventually go back to normal. Parts of our financial system and many property owners have been in a zombie-like state for much of the last two years, [ Read More → ]

While Ottawa makes noises about boosting financial literacy, it’s curious that this country’s 289,000 financial advisors seldom talk about debt. The industry thinks it’s OK that 40% of Canadians now retire with some debt, with many going deeper into hock once they stop working. Little wonder that a thousand or [ Read More → ]

Anna and Charlie Reynolds of St. George, Utah, were worried about losing their home to foreclosure last year. Then they got a lucky break—from an unlikely savior. Some investment funds are emerging as the best hope for millions of U.S. households, like the Reynolds, above, who were behind on [ Read More → ]

It’s nearly four months since stocks reached their 2010 highs and began falling on investors’ doubts about the economic recovery. Some analysts say it could be another year before investors get up enough confidence to restart the rally. The economy isn’t helping them. Last week, the Federal Reserve and two mass-market [ Read More → ]

There are a lot of bank fees that deserve the “Slater Slide.’’ Steven Slater is the JetBlue flight attendant who allegedly cursed a rude passenger and then opened an emergency exit and jumped down the aircraft’s slide. He slid into infamy or history — depending on your take on [ Read More → ]

As The Telegraph has revealed over recent weeks, the level of charges really needs to be a factor when it comes to making an investment decision. Our exposé is backed up by new research just published in America on US funds. As we report elsewhere, a report by the leading [ Read More → ]

Think you can guess the direction of the market? Surely, any fool could have foreseen the market’s collapse after failed in September 2008. And by March 2009, stocks were so cheap that they had nowhere to go but up. Market timing seems so easy in hindsight. What’s more, plenty of [ Read More → ]

In the real estate world, there was one word that used to be the cardinal rule: location, location, location. Just about anybody — the informed and uninformed — could buy a house in a good location and easily make money by flipping, selling or refinancing the home, sometimes after just a [ Read More → ]