Relief for storm affected customers as Banks extend fee waivers.

It's an effort to ease pressureon customers to make bill payments when nearly 1.8 million homes and businesses remain without power across a swath of states. 49 Photos Sandy's devastation on Staten Island View the Full Gallery » JPMorgan Chase Inc., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo Inc., PNC Financial Services Inc., Bank of America Inc. and HSBC are among the institutions that have offered such help for their customers. Most have extended their deadlines until Nov. 7. The banks themselves still face power outages, forcing the shutdown of dozens of branches and ATMs in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia.

Keynesian School

Keynesian School Reacting to the severity of the worldwide depression, John Maynard Keynes in 1936 broke from the Classical tradition with the publication of the General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. The Classical view assumed that in a recession, wages and prices would decline to restore full employment. Keynes held that the opposite was true. Falling prices and wages, by depressing people's incomes, would prevent a revival of spending. He insisted that direct government intervention wasnecessary to increase total spending. Keynes' arguments proved the modern rationale for the use of government spendingand taxing to stabilize the economy. Government would spend and decrease taxes when private spendingwas insufficient and threatened a recession; it would reduce spending andincrease taxes when private spending was too great and threatened inflation. His analytic framework, focusing on the factors that determinetotal spending, remains the core of modern macroeconomic analysis

Institutionalist School

Institutionalist economists regard individual economic behavior as part of a larger social pattern influenced by current ways of living and modes of thought. They rejected the narrow Classical view that people are primarily motivated by economic self-interest. Opposing the laissez-faire attitude towards government's role in the economy, the Institutionalistscalled for government controls and social reform to bring about a more equal distribution of income.

Marxist School (economic term)

The Marxist School challenged the foundations of Classical theory. Writing during the mid-19th century, Karl Marx saw capitalism as an evolutionary phase in economic development. He believed that capitalism would ultimately destroy itself and be succeeded by a world without private property. An advocate of a labor theory of value, Marx believed that all production belongs to labor because workers produce all value within society. He believed that the market system allowscapitalists, the owners of machinery and factories, to exploit workers by denying them a fair share of what they produce. Marx predicted that capitalism would produce growing misery for workers as competition for profit led capitalists to adopt labor-saving machinery, creating a"reserve army of the unemployed" who would eventually rise up and seize the means of production.

Marginalist School (economic term)

Marginalist School Classical economists theorized that prices are determined by the costs of production. Marginalist economists emphasized that prices also depend upon thelevel of demand, which in turn depends upon the amount of consumer satisfaction provided by individual goods and services. Marginalists provided modern macroeconomics with the basic analytic tools of demand and supply, consumer utility, and a mathematical framework for using those tools. Marginalists also showed thatin a free market economy, the factors of production -- land, labor, and capital -- receive returns equal to theircontributions to production. This principle was sometimes used to justify the existing distribution of income: that people earned exactly what they or their property contributed to production.

NYSE Composite Index

NYSE Composite Index – Thecomposite index covering price movements of all common stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Itis based on the close of the market December 31, 1965, as 50 and is weighted according to the number of shares listed for each issue. The index is computed continuously and printed onthe ticker tape. Point changesin the index are converted to dollars and cents so as to provide a meaningful measure of changes in the average price of listed stocks.The composite index is supplemented by separate indexes for four industry groups: industrial, transportation, utility and finance.

Mortgage bond

Mortgage bond – A bond secured by a mortgage on a property. The value of the property may or may not equal the value of the bondsissued against it.

Nasdaq

Nasdaq – An automated information network that provides brokers and dealers with price quotationson securities traded over-the-counter. Nasdaq is an acronym for National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations.

Money market fund

Money market fund – A mutual fund whose investments are in high-yield money market instruments such as federal securities, CDs and commercial paper. Its intent is to make such instruments, normally purchased in large denominations by institutions, available indirectly to individuals.

Net change

Net change – The change in the price of a security from the closing price on one day to the closing price the next day on which the stock is traded. The net change is ordinarily the last figure in the newspaper stock price list. The mark +1 1/8 means up $1.125 a share from the last sale on the previous day the stock traded.