Virginia Varela, Golden Pacific Bank president and CEO, offers her insight into the region’s community banks.

California’s major revenue sources have shifted over time. Until 1995, the biggest was property taxes. Today, it’s personal income taxes.

And California ranks fairly high in overall taxation: 10th highest both per capita and as a percentage of personal income, based on the latest available data from the U.S. Census.

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the largest U.S. pension fund, is weighing a policy to urge companies in which it invests to disclose sexual-harassment settlements.

If the math proved easy when pricing your home, perhaps you’ve made this critical mistake. 

When you really think about it, what are the two pieces of finance that can impact someone the hardest? The answer, we think, is budgeting and credit.

So why is it that we don’t learn about these topics in school?  

Getting into college is only half the challenge; paying for it is quite another. According to research conducted by two assistant professors of economics, in a paper titled “Accounting for the Rising in College Tuition,” the cost of college tuition more than doubled from 1987 to 2010, and outpaced inflation by 2-4 percent.

As it stands today, roughly 12 million Baby Boomers own some type of small business, the combined value of which is roughly equal to $10 trillion. This comes at a time when the oldest of them have just crossed into their seventies.

PayPal is turning to its old nemesis, plastic, to help it expand beyond the digital realm.

Ten years ago Monday, a pair of Bear Stearns hedge funds that had gorged on subprime mortgage securities filed for bankruptcy, becoming the canaries in the coal mine for the global financial system that collapsed 15 months later.

Alan Brill has scoured computers for intelligence left by Iraqi forces retreating from Kuwait. He has probed a bank in Bosnia suspected of funding ethnically targeted mass murder. He has investigated the work of hackers who got inside the 2008 presidential campaign networks of Barack Obama and John McCain.

What’s on his radar now? Your kids.