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Today, Mayor Bloomberg held his mid-year budget update at City Hall. Here is the big picture: The mayor is still planning for a severe but temporary downturn in revenues. But there's a very real risk -- one that went unmentioned by the mayor Read More

Late yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg announced a two-year labor agreement with District Council 37, New York City’s largest public-sector union. The agreement is a missed opportunity for the city, which stands on the brink of what could be an unpreceden Read More

The analysts at Municipal Market Advisors think that should Sen. Barack Obama win tonight, President Obama's planned income-tax hike on individual households earning over $250k could push up demand for tax-exempt municipal bonds. Read More

Addressing the possibility of mid-year cuts in school aid, which Senate leaders are pledging to avoid, Governor Paterson is quoted in today's Newsday as saying: "Seventy-one percent of the resources we spend on education are administrative. We can make a lot of cuts ... without touching the classroom or affecting teachers." Read More

Swiss bank UBS has attracted $1.5 billion to its new global infrastructure fund. "John Fraser, chairman and chief executive office of the UBS AG's funds arm, said ... he was encouraged by the demand from long-term institutional investors, including p Read More

Hardly anyone seems to believe that recent events in the global economy and financial markets will lead to long-term price stability.*  So assuming a recession is upon us, what’s next: or ? S Read More

Technology giant Sun Microsystems reported yesterday that its tech sales to the northeastern United States' financial industry were down 20 percent last quarter compared to the same period a year earlier, the Journal reports. The financial Read More

The some expenditure details of , northern California, pop. 117,000. Vallejo declared bankruptcy earlier this year after having unsustainably ramped up public spending in response to unsustainable tax revenues stemming from unsustainable property- Read More

Wall Street has been shaken to its foundations, state and city revenues are plummeting, the long term fiscal outlook grows grimmer every week -- and Mayor Bloomberg today announced with a municipal labor union.  The 8,300 members of the Correction Read More

Forecasters at the Centre for Economics and Business Research in London think that securities-industry bonuses there will plummet 60 percent this winter. London bankers reaped the equivalent of $17 billion in bonuses in 2006, the peak year; in New Read More

In a press conference Q&A today, Mayor Bloomberg said of state spending that cuts to Medicaid and education are "politically very difficult." Read More

In the of his congressional testimony yesterday, Governor David Paterson made this pointed reference to what the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to call the "balance of payments deficit" between New York State and the federal government: Read More