Grave business - my financial world

General Electric said Wednesday it intended to raise $12 billion through a common stock offering, in addition to plans to allow billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway to buy up to $6 billion in stock.
GE (GE, Fortune 500) shares, which were halted ahead of the news, moved off their lows but were still down […]

WASHINGTON–The Bush administration yesterday formally proposed to Congress what could become the largest financial bailout in U.S. history, requesting virtually unfettered authority for the Treasury to buy up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets from financial institutions based in the United States.
The proposal was stunning in its simplicity: less than three pages, it […]

With Tropical Storm Gustav setting its sights on the Gulf of Mexico, oil facilities in the region are facing their first major threat since 2005, when Hurricanes Rita and Katrina knocked out nearly every barrel of oil production and sent prices soaring to then-record levels.
But this time around, if Gustav intensifies and heads into […]

The U.K. budget deficit ballooned to the widest since records started in 1946, adding pressure on Prime Minister Gordon Brown to ease his decade-old borrowing rules.
The shortfall was 24.4 billion pounds ($49 billion) in the three months through June, the Office for National Statistics said today. Last month, the deficit expanded to 9.2 […]

General Motors Corp. said Tuesday it will suspend its dividend, sell off $4 billion to $7 billion worth of assets and cut 20% worth of salaried cash costs in an overall plan to save billions of dollars.
"We need to take some very tough actions to ensure our survival and success," said Chief Executive Rick […]

The economy turned in a better - but still subpar - performance in the first three months of this year, mostly spurred by stronger sales of U.S. products overseas.
The 1% annualized increase in gross domestic product, announced by the Commerce Department on Thursday, marked a slight improvement from the government’s previous estimate of 0.9% […]

Beleaguered cell phone maker Motorola Inc. said Thursday that it is laying off another 2,600 workers, bringing the company’s total employee cuts to more than 10,000 since last year.
Motorola (MOT, Fortune 500) will take a pretax charge of about $104 million in the first quarter for severance costs from the new layoffs, the company […]

The Asian Development Bank lowered its economic growth forecasts for the region as a global slowdown weighs on exports and expansions in China and India cool.
Asia excluding Japan is predicted to expand 7.6 percent this year, less than a September estimate of 8.2 percent, the Manila-based institution said in a report today. The […]

The blockbuster initial public offering of Visa Inc (V.N: Quote, Profile, Research) — the largest ever in the United States — will do little to revive the slowing IPO market, which has been dampened by investors spooked by the credit crisis.
With its $17.9 billion offering, the world’s largest credit-card network’s IPO is the […]

Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago President Charles Evans said officials can make clear their commitment to stable prices by “promptly'' reversing interest- rate cuts when “insurance'' against growth risks is no longer needed.
“When insurance proves to be no longer necessary, removing it promptly and recalibrating policy to appropriate levels will reiterate and […]