Archive for October, 2011
They don’t pay their fair share in taxes. Many of them subsist on government subsidies and bailouts. And some have poor manners, to boot. So, what good are the rich? That’s the question I posed to Robert Frank, the long-suffering Wall Street Journal extreme wealth correspondent and author of the new book, High Beta Rich: [...]
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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! At The Economist’s Buttonwood Gathering in lower Manhattan this week, the prevailing mood was in opposition to the euphoria in the financial markets. The odds of a ‘double-dip’ recession have declined in recent weeks thanks to Europe’s latest bailout and another round of better-than-expected economic data, but “the [...]
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William Henry Gates, III was born on October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington. Like him or loathe him, Mr. Gates possesses all of the qualifications needed for birthday well-wishes on this blog: He is a Dad (a father of three) and he is definitely a Geek.
Gates founded "Micro-soft" with Paul Allen in 1975. (The hyphen …
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BOSTON (TheStreet) — It’s going to take a lot more than yesterday’s 3.4% gain in the S&P 500 Index to lure fed-up mutual fund investors back to the fold.
Americans have been in full flight this year, withdrawing $84 billion from U.S. equity mutual funds through Oct. 11 versus $83 billion for all of last year, according to TrimTabs Investment Research.
With yesterday’s gain in the S&P 500, the benchmark index is up 14% this month, the biggest monthly increase since 1974. The reason for the rise was Europe boosting a rescue fund to 1 trillion euros ($1.4…
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October 22nd marked the 10th birthday of Microsoft XP and the operating system is spending the special occasion by slipping quietly into retirement.
As the first major change in Microsoft?s operating system platforms, it was not well perceived in the beginning. XP was bashed by many major IT magazines who said that ?Windows 2000 significantly outperformed …
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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! The Daily Ticker was on location Thursday covering The Economist’s Annual Buttonwood Gathering. We caught up with former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, Blackrock’s head of fixed income Peter Fisher and former car czar and investment banking rainmaker Steven Rattner. In the accompanying clip, Aaron Task talks to Rattner [...]
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Dark Sky is a weather app that only tells you what will happen in the next hour, at most. What’s the point of that, you ask? Because by limiting itself to what will happen next, Dark Sky can be spookily accurate.
The app, by Adam Grossman and Jack Turner, analyses weather radar data and tells you …
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There is a mathematical problem running through the mainstream of economic thought, one that has been expressed in various forms since the time of Adam Smith. There is apparently a shortcoming to capitalism that springs forth from the very basic, elemental idea of profits. If businesses can make a profit on their endeavors, necessarily paying only a portion of their revenue to labor, then who will buy all the products they produce?
If we view the customer base of business in general to be the very workers that allow the means of production to occur, then the mathematical fact that those same…
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The world economy has once again dodged Armageddon. The European Union finally forged a Greek bond deal, and a rescue fund big enough to ring-fence banks and sovereign debt, in order to avoid a catastrophic, Lehman-like contagion event. At the same time, the U.S. economy moved away from the threat of recession with a third-quarter real GDP report of 2.5 percent. In response, stocks are soaring. We’ll live to see another day.
First the American economy. Led by surging business investment of highly profitable corporations and a modest gain in consumer spending, the new GDP report says…
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As we’ve discussed many times on this program, the gap between the rich and the poor is big and getting bigger in America. “The distribution of market income became more unequal almost continuously between 1979 and 2007,” according to the report from the Congressional Budget Office. Here’s how the numbers break down over that time [...]
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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! For over a month, The Daily Ticker has extensively covered the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations by trying to shed light on who the protesters are and what exactly it is they hope to change. (See: Occupy Wall Street: What’s It All About?) Since Occupy Wall Street has been [...]
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Provided by the Business Insider’s Simone Foxman: For the majority of a nerve-wracking summit that dragged on more than 10 hours, from 6 PM CET Wednesday to 4 AM CET Thursday morning, all attempts at progress to stem the crisis appeared to hit a wall. But EU leaders finally made a breakthrough. At 3:30 AM [...]
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Government: President Obama wants student loans to be more like student handouts. Too bad he hasn’t learned one of the lessons of the 2008 mortgage crisis: Free money costs plenty.
The global financial crisis has its roots in the U.S. government’s politicization of mortgages. Washington decided that all those real-life versions of mean old bank president Mr. Potter from “It’s a Wonderful Life” shouldn’t just turn into big-hearted Jimmy Stewarts.
No, they should practically become welfare officers, doling out money to people with bad credit ratings to buy homes,…
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TRAVELING IN SOUTH CAROLINA-Gray Court, a tiny town in northwestern South Carolina, is an unlikely place for a presidential candidate to unveil his proposal for overhauling the federal income tax, but Governor Rick Perry of Texas did just that on Tuesday.
Why did Perry announce his tax plan in South Carolina? Because on January 21, 2012, the Palmetto State will hold the second presidential primary, after New Hampshire (where Mitt Romney is expected to win). Perry must come in among the first three in South Carolina in order to stay in the race.
The Republican Party is seeing the battle of the…
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More than once over the years this column has sought to expose the absurdity of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) calculations. On their face they presume that the U.S. is an isolated economic island, rather than an integrated aspect of a global economic whole.
Nobel Laureate Robert Mundell long ago observed that the only closed economy is the world economy, and as such, U.S. production (think the globalized manufacture of Apple’s iPad, or Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner) is a function of ties to economic activity occurring around the world. GDP presumes a country alone, and worse uniformity;…
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