Finance Geek

You can now follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! U.S. stocks are trading higher Thursday morning after their worst daily loss in eight weeks Wednesday. Still, the ongoing debt-ceiling debate in Washington is casting a pall of uncertainty over the market. With just days to go until the August 2 deadline, the debate does [...]

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In the past few days, investors have finally begun to worry that the debt-ceiling fight in Washington will lead to a market crash. And some of them have begun rushing for the exits. Longer-term, investors worry that the stock market has come so far in the past two years–doubling off the 2009 lows–and that the [...]

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The BBC has launched the international version of its iPlayer app for the iPad. The app, which lets users stream and download the Beeb’s TV shows, is free and available in the following countries: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland.

The app differs from the local, UK-only version …

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Wednesday’s Beige Book report and durable goods data brought more evidence of a weakening economy, and that’s before taking into account the unknowable impact of the debt-ceiling impasse. Given the still weak jobs market and housing sector, economists are slashing growth forecasts and talk of a “double-dip” recession is resurfacing. But fear not. This too [...]

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Though some conservative pundits have said that the break down between President Obama and Congress over the debt limit stems from Obama’s insistence on perpetuating, at all costs, the European-style welfare state he has helped create in America, there’s something even more fundamental at issue: At this juncture in human history, is the general welfare better served by redistributing wealth-or by growing it?
In the years leading up to the French Revolution, the then French Queen, Marie Antoinette, when hearing that peasants had no bread and were starving, supposedly responded:…

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WASHINGTON-A resolution of the debt ceiling stalemate may be in sight. On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office announced that House Speaker John Boehner’s Budget Control Act, as amended, would reduce the budget deficit by $915 billion over the next decade. This opens the way for the bill to be considered on the House floor today, Thursday. A version approved by the Democratic and Republican leadership could go to the Senate over the weekend and to President Obama early next week.
At the heart of the painful negotiations over deficit reduction has been the tension between…

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Standard & Poor’s government-credit-ratings guru David Beers played his cards close to the vest on the topic of a U.S. downgrade in our CNBC interview this week. However, this head of S&P’s global sovereign-ratings business — with a staff of 80 covering 126 countries — issued three strong warnings to the debt-ceiling negotiators in Washington.
Beers avoided direct comments on any of the key debt-limit plans. But when I asked him about joint congressional committees that would report back with additional budget savings at the end of the year, he said, “Well,…

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Amazon first turned an annual operating profit in 2002, making $64 million on just under $4 billion in revenue, an impressive feat in a rotten economy. In our rotten economy, Amazon made $201 million in operating income on almost $10 billion in revenue ?? in just one off-season quarter.

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The stock market was looking a little sickly Wednesday, which makes Amazon.com’s rally all the more impressive. In recent trading, shares of the online retailer were up 4.7% to $224.19. The session is a microcosm for the prior quarter, where Amazon bucked an economic slowdown to post stellar second-quarter results, featuring a whopping 51% year-over-year [...]

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The breakdown of the debt-ceiling talks has caused a major rethink of what had been conventional wisdom on Wall Street: That politicians would never be so crazy as to miss the Aug. 2 deadline and trigger U.S. debt default or loss of America’s triple-A rating. Or so the thinking went. But after having largely dismissed [...]

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Stocks were heading lower Wednesday morning but, to date, investors have been pretty blasé about the whole debt ceiling debate. “The markets are pretty calm and it looks like they expect something to get done,” says Jonathan Steinberg, CEO of WisdomTree Investments (WETF). “It doesn’t seem there is a panic on the side of investors [...]

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Maybe tattoos aren’t just for Harley riders or rebellious teens after all. In a few years, diabetics might get inked up with digital tats that communicate with an iPhone to monitor their blood.

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Dunkin’ Donuts may soon really be able to live up to its slogan — “American runs on Dunkin’”. After Tuesday’s close, Dunkin’ Brands Group is slated to go public in a highly anticipated IPO. The company expects to raise roughly $400 million to help expand the Dunkin’ Donuts store and brand across the Midwest and [...]

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After a steady stream of angry blog posts and heated debate among its own users over the value of pseudonymity on the web, Google announced on Monday that it was revising its “real name” policy, at least for display, on Google+.

In a post on Google+, Google VP Bradley Horowitz promised greater transparency, particularly in suspension …

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Among the many guilty co-conspirators in the housing bubble were appraisers who succumbed to pressure from loan officers, buyers and real estate agents eager to get deals done. Wary of losing business, these appraisers submitted home valuations that were unrealistically high, contributing to an upward spiral of prices that was unsustainable.
Appraisers’ lack of independence brought calls for reform once the market melted down, including a spate of new federal regulations commencing in 2009, the latest in a long string of efforts by the government over the last half century to reform the…

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