The Obama administration’s ambitious plan to overhaul U.S. financial regulation was bogged down in Congress as it returned from a long recess on Tuesday.
With no clear path forward in the Senate, analysts and lobbyists said Democrats would be hard-pressed to enact tighter bank and capital market rules by year-end, a deadline self-imposed months ago by [...]

That’s the quip that lobbyists and congressional aides use, only half-jokingly, to explain what’s in store for the banking industry as governments crack down with tighter regulation.
From higher capital standards and tighter oversight, to slimmer profits and smaller bonuses, global banking promises to be a duller and less lucrative business in years ahead.
That’s not to [...]

small business sentiment improved last month on hopes that the worst of the country’s recession was over, an industry group said on Tuesday, but conditions remain very weak.
The National Federation of Independent Business said its optimism index improved by 2.1 points to 88.6 in August, thanks to improved expectations for future business and real sales [...]

Google has introduced Google Domestic Trends on Google Finance. This is a feature that tracks search traffic (on Google) across specific sectors of the economy.
“The changes in the search volume of a given sector on google.com may provide useful economic insight,” Google says. “We have created 23 indexes that track the major economic sectors, such [...]