So I heard the latest economic bulletin from President Obama: that the whole problem with the economy and the federal budget is because of a tax break for corporate jets.
Really? We’re in economic and fiscal trouble because we haven’t raised a tiny little tax on corporate jets? Does the president have any concept of how irrelevant this is? The tax accounts for less than one tenth of one percent of the deficit reduction his negotiations with the Republican are supposed to achieve. Moreover, as he sneers derisively about the owners of corporate jets, does he have any concept of their…
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Subprime Scandal: Democrats thought they’d dammed up the truth about government’s role in the financial crisis. But the levies are breaking, thanks to a spate of rogue new books on the subject.
The latest, “Reckless Endangerment,” shreds the narrative carefully constructed by Democrats and the liberal media that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were only bit players in the crisis and followed Wall Street into subprime lending.
It details how the federally chartered mortgage giants in fact led the way in relaxing underwriting standards for the entire industry - thanks to…
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Perception often trumps reality in both politics and on Wall Street. So when you combine the two, it’s especially important to separate what’s really going on from what everyone says is going on. Which brings us to President Obama’s fund-raising efforts in financial circles: The popular view is the president alienated Wall Street with his [...]
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It didn’t start well — Gmail sent my coveted early invite to Google+ to spam as a potential phishing attack. So what to think of it after just a few days? Tech prognostication is always iffy — it’s very hard to guess what will actually capture people’s attention over time, once the gloss rubs off. But Google+ is smooth, fast and intuitive — a product that feels far more akin to the revolution that was Gmail than to its less successful iniatives like Wave and Knol.
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If your last cell phone purchase wasn’t a smartphone and you’re living stateside, consider yourself in the minority.
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Struggling to pay your mortgage? Late on your payments? In danger of being foreclosed? The federal government has cooked up a sweet deal that could result in a loan you don’t have to repay. The $1 Billion Emergency Homeowners Loan Program is the latest attempt by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to slow [...]
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Lost in the European debt shuffle has been a much larger conversation that needs to take place. Mainstream economics has given some cursory thought and half-hearted lip service to rethinking the wisdom of “too big to fail” (TBTF). That might be a start and moral hazard is a deal with the devil, undoubtedly, but we need to think far beyond that, all the way to the core of the modern fiat economy.
Any debate about TBTF is essentially an argument for re-allocating intermediation capacity within the overall framework of the larger financial economy, such as it may be called. Before even…
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By Chris Foresman, Ars Technica
The first Thunderbolt compatible peripherals??Promise’s??Pegasus RAIDs??started shipping??on Tuesday. Using the RAIDs with a Thunderbolt equipped Mac, though, requires a rather expensive $50 cable that is??only available from Apple. We dug into the design of the cable to find out why Apple felt justified in charging $50 for some plastic-wrapped copper wire, …
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The Federal Reserve Board announced new debit card rules yesterday on how much banks can charge merchants for each debit card transactions, as mandated by the “Durbin Amendment” to the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. “[The Fed] backed away from a proposal to cap debit interchange fees at 12 cents per transaction, and instead caps these [...]
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Google suffered a serious legal setback when a federal judge said the media giant could be held liable for damages for secretly intercepting data on open Wi-Fi routers across the United States.
That was the ruling late Wednesday by a Silicon Valley federal judge presiding over nearly a dozen combined lawsuits seeking damages from Google for …
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As the Presidential race of 2012 heats up and the U.S. unemployment rate remains staggeringly high, most discussions in Washington and on the Campaign trail have to do with jobs. For example, just yesterday President Obama brought the debt ceiling and budget negotiations back to the issue of jobs and the economy in his first [...]
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Delorme’s InReach GPS Communicator lets you send text messages, even when you are in the wilderness and far away from cellphone coverage.
As befits a GPS device, it’s all done with satellites. Delorme has teamed up with Iridium, the satellite phone people, to offer a $10-per-month messaging package.
It works in two ways. First of all, you …
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Democrats and Republicans are locked in a death-grip over how to cut the deficit but agree the government must get its financial house in order. So you’d think there’d be bipartisan support to end the $6 billion annual subsidy for corn ethanol, which most experts agree is money poorly spent. Former Car Czar Steven Rattner [...]
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Photo Gallery: Departing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is a self-styled realist who cut a lot of cherished military programs. But a reflection on the military tech he favored — and disfavored — shows that he was mostly out to cut back on cherished military fantasies.
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Normally I’d complain about an iOS camera triggering app which requires a computer as well as a camera to make it work, but when that camera is loaded with the Phase One back, which pumps out 80MP images, you’re going to need somewhere bigger than the iPad to put them.
The app is Phase One’s Capture …
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