Finance Globe

The IRS announced that it continues to make “strong progress” in their efforts to fight international tax evasion and has recieved up to 30,000 voluntary disclosures since 2009. “By any measure, we are in the middle of an unprecedented period for our global international tax enforcement efforts,” said IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman. “We have pierced international bank secrecy laws, and we are making a serious dent in offshore tax evasion.” The IRS said that global tax...

The median household income fell in 2010, resulting in an increase in the percentage of people living in poverty for the third year in a row, the government reported on Tuesday. The U.S. Census Bureau said that last year’s median household income of $49,445 was 2.3 percent lower than it was in 2009, and 6.4 percent lower than it was in 2007 - the year before the last recession started. In 2010, the official U.S. poverty...

The economy added more jobs than expected in September, the government reported on Friday. While not quite enough to reduce the unemployment rate, it may be enough to thwart another recession. Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis said, "Our nation's labor market posted growth in the month of September.” Non-farm payroll employment added 137,000 private sector jobs. Health care added 44,000 jobs in September, for a total of 336,000 over the past year. Employment in professional and...

U.S. Government considering a broad rescue. There's talk of a historic move by the federal government to control the ensuing credit crisis by rescuing financial institutions from their bad investment decisions. Though details of the plan have not been finalized, the government is considering forming a government entity to absorb the bad loans that are responsible for the failures of huge companies and the uncertainty of the economy. This move is reported to be similar to...

Equifax, one of the world’s largest suppliers of credit information and related services, recently announced a data breach that may have affected as many as 143 million consumers in the United States.The company went on to explain that “criminals exploited a U.S. website application vulnerability to gain access to certain files.”At this point, Equifax believes that the access occurred from the middle of May 2017 through July 2017. The information accessed by the criminals includes:•    Names•   ...

The federal government on Tuesday ordered Citibank and its subsidiaries to pay back consumers approximately $700 million harmed by the bank's illegal practices conducted from 2003 through 2012. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) said that roughly 7 million of the bank's customers were affected by Citibank and its vendor's deceptive marketing, unfair billing practices, and administration of debt protection and credit monitoring services.Citibank's debt protection services "AccountCare," "Balance Protector," "Credit Protection," "Credit Protector," and "Payment Safeguard" promised...

What is a recession? A recession is often defined as two consecutive quarters of slowing economic growth, as measured by the gross domestic product (GDP), but it's really a little more complicated than that. Economists must measure data regarding personal income, unemployment rates, industrial production, and sales and manufacturing volume to determine whether we are heading towards or already in a recession. Even after the pros analyze the data, they often don't agree whether we are...

So, have you received the friendly little reminder the IRS sent to you? Many taxpayers will receive a rebate of $600, $1200 for joint filers, and an additional $300 for each qualifying child. Even those with no tax liability may receive $300; all you have to do to be eligible is to file your 2007 tax return. High-income filers may receive reduced payments or no payment. The IRS will start sending these out in May, separately...

There's been a lot of heated discussion about the mortgage bailout. And why shouldn't the discussion be heated? Predatory lenders and gullible borrowers got together, and somehow the borrowers became convinced that they could afford a house they didn't have the income to pay for. Thinking the boom in real estate would never end and that housing prices would continue to climb, they gambled on the biggest purchase of their lifetime. Rather than play on the...

Unfinished business in the wake of the housing bust My neighborhood is still under construction. The back of the subdivision has unfinished gravel roads, and some of them are still dirt. Empty, weed-grown lots abound, scattered with a few finished houses on a few paved roads. "Lot available" signs dot the land on what used to be acres and acres of cornfields. There were supposed to be three phases of construction, but this third phase has...