Finance Geek

NEW YORK (TheStreet) — The U.S. may be reclaiming its job as the global growth engine.
Carmaker Ford(F), package-delivery company UPS(UPS), chemical maker DuPont(DD) and consumer-goods firm 3M(MMM) all said their U.S. businesses picked up in the third quarter while international growth slowed.
Caterpillar(CAT), the world’s largest maker of construction equipment, forecasts that growth in China will continue to wane, and the U.S. will improve. U.S. aircraft company Boeing(B), which reported third-quarter results today, foreshadowed this shifting trend already in 2010.
China and other…

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! “Better-than-expected” has made more than one appearance in the headlines for some of the most recent economic data. For the month of September: -New home sales rose 5.7% to levels not seen since April. -Orders for durable goods, excluding transportation, increased 1.7%, and nondefense goods, excluding aircraft, increased [...]

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! European leaders are having yet another summit this week to talk about their banking-and-sovereign debt crisis, which has been unfolding over the last few years. The hope is that they’ll finally arrive at an over-arching solution that will finally solve the problem once and for all. But they [...]

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Most of the coverage of today’s economic difficulties focuses on older folks. How will the mid-career people who lost their jobs during the deep recession of 2008-2009 find new posts? Will the Baby Boomers, and whether they will be able to rely on Social Security and Medicare? What can be done to help homeowners and [...]

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Amazon just reported its third quarter results. The company missed Wall Street’s estimates for both revenue and earnings and said it would have lower profit margins next quarter. This resulted in the usual spanking of Amazon’s stock, as short-term profit seekers growled in disgust and raced for the exits. In other words, with respect to [...]

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You know I like to use pictures for data from time to time, right? One problem is that I don’t know much about cameras. There, I said it. Really, almost all of my photos are made with my phone. That is what makes the phone so great, you almost always have …

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Affordable markets are those where the median house price is less than or equal to three times median income. The United States as a whole is affordable with an average score of 3.0. As the nearby chart indicates, this places the U.S. at the head of the affordability class among seven ranked countries, with the other six ranging from moderately unaffordable to severely unaffordable.
Significantly, half of the 211 housing markets in the U.S. are ranked as affordable, with another 35% ranked as moderately unaffordable. For the other six countries, almost eighty percent of their 114 markets were…

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President Obama continues to pretend that jobs are his top priority.
His $447 billion jobs bill recently failed to pass the Senate, so now the White House has promised to push it in bite-sized chunks. At the same time, though, the administration is pushing radical employment policies that are squashing private business, slowing job growth and hampering economic recovery. These efforts must stop.
Consider the shenanigans of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
A few weeks ago, the NLRB ordered the nation’s employers to post a notice by mid-November informing workers about their…

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A big-screen Apple TV: Let’s accept that such a device is inevitable, and consider what Apple may deliver to the “connected TV” landscape, were it brave enough to accept the challenge.

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! Steve Jobs, the widely-anticipated new autobiography by Walter Isaacson, provides an inside look at the Apple founder’s professional and personal life. Our friends at Simon & Schuster, publisher of the new book, recently interviewed Isaacson and kindly shared the video with us to share with The Daily Ticker [...]

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In 2010 Netflix CEO Reed Hastings was named Fortune Magazine’s Business Person of the Year. How quickly things change. After a year riddled with missteps and misfortunes, Hastings has quickly fallen from grace with not only his customers, but his shareholders as well. Netflix stock price dropped nearly 30% on Monday, falling below $100 per [...]

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Google reports that U.S. government requests for user data for use in criminal investigations continues to rise, even as a bill to require an officer to get a judge’s approval to get at a citizen’ online communications stalls.

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On October 15, groups protesters affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement began filing into the branch offices of their banks in order to close their accounts. Later that day, videos began to show up online of those protesters being arrested. Irate branch managers had called the cops, claiming that those who were crowded into …

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! Every few years, the GOP becomes enamored of the concept of a “flat tax” that would leave all Americans paying the same percentage of their income in taxes and greatly simplify the tax-preparation process. And now GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry has become the latest candidate to propose [...]

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You’ve heard of Greco-Roman wrestling. Now there’s a Greco-Roman financial crisis. The headlines coming out of Europe are filled with talk of a banking and sovereign debt crisis in Europe. The problems, which had their origins in Athens, have now spread to Rome — and have become much larger in the process. Why we should [...]

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