Corporate America’s future customers, at least that’s the hope (Kim Kyung-Hoon/REUTERS) “There are hundreds of Groupon clones there (in China),” Groupon CEO Andrew Mason told me a couple of months ago, “It’s tricky to figure out how an American business can participate.” Looks like he did. Groupon, the molten hot social shopping company, is setting [...]
Warren Buffet focuses on exports for growth (Jason Lee/REUTERS) Leave it to Warren Buffet to be the biggest America bull. The legendary billionaire investor gave a pep talk on our country’s prospects to investors in his annual shareholder’s letter, arguing that the nation’s “best days lie ahead” and pledged to pour record amounts of money [...]
Something pretty incredible is going on in Germany. While the U.S. and much of the rest of the developed world is suffering not only with high unemployment, but also stubborn unemployment, Germany has been heading in the exact opposite direction. Defying the odds, Germany’s unemployment rate has been declining during the Great Recession. According to [...]
Oil climb has traders and others saying oh-no (Photo: Reuters/Brendan McDermid) Here’s something you never hear: Oil caused the financial crisis. Back when the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission started a year and a half ago, they had 22 things they were looking into. Oil didn’t even make the list. And why not? On the surface [...]
The word “productivity” has become a dirty one to many Americans. There is a perception that the more productivity goes up, the more jobs are lost. That’s not entirely wrong. Productivity is defined as the amount of output produced per input used – by inputs, we mean labor, equipment, etc. One way to get productivity [...]
This house may have never sold (Photo: Jeff Haynes/REUTERS) Note: This is a guest post written by TIME reporter Josh Sanburn. UPDATE (11:00AM, February 23): The National Association of Realtors said that existing home sales rose 2.7% in January from December, and were up 5.3% from a year ago. It was the first time in [...]
Sad traders no more (Mike Segar/REUTERS) Unemployment is still high and salaries are compressed, but one thing that’s rising like nobody’s business is stocks. The S&P 500 recently grew 100% from the level that it fell to during the low point of the financial crisis back in March 2009 – the fastest such doubling in [...]
Once again, the industrious finance ministers of the G-20 met to solve the world’s economic problems, this time in Paris, and after hours of haggling and arm-twisting over the weekend, ended up with something that looks like an agreement on one of the biggest challenges facing the global economy today: giant imbalances. There is almost [...]
Obama talks budget cuts (Kevin Lamarque/REUTERS) Washington is absorbed with how much it has to cut in order to get our financial house in order. And the conclusion by many is that President Obama’s proposed budget, which lowers the amount of debt we are set to take on in the next decade by $1 trillion, [...]
(Photo: Brian Blanco/REUTERS) It had to come to this eventually. The budget war has morphed into a cultural war. Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) wants the Army to stop spending millions of defense dollars on NASCAR sponsorships. The army shells out $7 million to rent space on the Sprint Cup car driven by Ryan Newman. McCollum [...]
