Retailers have been screaming for years about the high interchange fees they pay to banks for the privilege of accepting Visa and Mastercard, and they tried unsuccessfully to get a fee limit included in this year’s credit-card legislation. Now the Government…

Fidelity Investments released some reassuring statistics about 401k plans today, noting that the average account balance is $60,700, up 13 percent in the third quarter and up 28 percent from the low point in January. Part of the increase comes from…

James Bullard is worried about “medium term” inflation and agitating for a subtle change in monetary policy, he said this morning at Commerce Bank’s annual economic breakfast. But Bullard, president of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, saved his strongest…

Judging from some of the news coming out of Washington, civil discourse seems to be in extremely short supply. Perhaps Americans would be more civil if they used an ancient Japanese poetry form to discuss the major issues of the day.

As…

John Reed, one of Vikram Pandit’s predecessors as chief executive of Citigroup, has been saying recently that Congress made a mistake in repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated the banking and investment industries. Pandit, however, doesn’t think reinstating the Depression-era law…

As the previous post mentions, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit was in town yesterday to speak at Washington University. He also visited with employees of the CitiMortgage division in O’Fallon, Mo., and announced some updated results for the company’s foreclosure prevention efforts. In the…

Citigroup Chief Executive Vikram Pandit spent an hour today with students at Washington University’s Olin School of Business, fielding questions on everything from bankers’ pay to the MBA job market.

Regarding the recent actions of federal pay czar Kenneth Feinberg, who…

Caterpillar has agreed to pay $16.5 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its 401k plans charged excessive fees to employees. Cat’s news release says the money, minus attorneys’ fees and costs, will go into the accounts of employees and former…

We’ve written recently about St. Louis’ lack of small-business job growth,  and today a new Kauffman Foundation study reminds us why this issue is so important. Analyzing U.S. Census data for 2007, Kauffman says that two-thirds of all net job creation…

SubsidyScope, a government-tracking effort of the Pew Charitable Trusts, has trained its lens on  Amtrak, and it says the railroad is losing a lot more money than it admits. After adding in depreciation and overhead, which an airline or any other…