credit markets

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Monday that the nation's economic weakness will continue for some time, even if the government's efforts to boost lending help restore the credit markets to normal.

Mortgage rates fell sharply yesterday after the administration announced that it will pump another $800 billion into credit markets to free up frozen consumer and mortgage lending.

With tight credit markets and a skepticism about the company's product lineup, tough reorganization may be the only way to fix what's wrong with the Silicon Valley company.

Treasury yields bounced back Friday, as investors bet that stocks would rally from a precipitous decline - a day after yields hit all-time lows in a warning that credit markets remain vulnerable and investors are hungry for the safety of government debt.

Despite government efforts, the credit markets remain frozen. Experts say President-elect Barack Obama needs to do something - fast.

The government's Troubled Asset Relief Program — known as TARP — was designed to thaw the frozen credit markets by, among other things, buying up financial firms' "toxic assets." The Treasury Department says it has given $155 billion to eight banks so far, which has helped them increase short-term lending.

But the department hasn't yet started to buy up problematic mortgage-backed securities.

Here's a sign that the credit markets are thawing: Some blue-chip merger targets are looking like less like blue-light specials.

Numbers are in for the third quarter of 2008, and the U.S. economy shrank by .3 percent.

This comes after 2.8 percent growth in the second quarter, meaning we’re still one more negative growth quarter away from officially being in a recession.

In a sign that the government's efforts to unfreeze the credit markets are starting to take hold, a key market for lending to major businesses and banks expanded for the first time in seven weeks, according to a Federal Reserve report released Thursday.

The Federal Reserve cut a key short-term interest rate by a half-percentage point Wednesday and expressed continued worries about the damage being done to the economy by the ongoing crisis in the financial and credit markets.