Facebook filed documents Wednesday with the SEC in preparation for one of the most anticipated initial public offerings in recent memory. The word on Wall Street is that the IPO will raise at least $5 billion for the firm. How does that stack up against past IPOs? According to Renaissance Capital, it would place Facebook as the 12th [...]
This is usually a slow time of the year for farm sales. It’s past prime planting season. Yet, Sam Kain, Des Moines area manager for land sales at Farmers National, is busy. He has 3 auctions this week. Most of the 30 or so bidders who show up will be farmers. But an increasing number [...]
Where were you the day the market dropped nearly 700 points in 20 minutes? Don’t remember. You’re not alone. May 6th was the one-year anniversary of the so-called Flash Crash. It came and went without much fanfare. But on the day of the event a year ago and for a few months after, it seemed [...]
Wall Street and Washington haven’t been getting along for a while. So perhaps it isn’t a surprise that the stock market seems somewhere between indifferent and gleeful at the prospect of a possible government shutdown. Stocks are up today, even as the likelihood of a government shutdown seems to have climbed from [...]
Happy Piggy (Getty Images) There is a lot of debate about whether prices are rising or not. And over whether we have too much inflation or not enough. But there is the price of one thing that surely seems to be hit with hyperinflation recently: The price of being happy. Last September, a study came [...]
It’s more than just what on the floor (Photo: Mike Segar/REUTERS) For the second day in the row, the US stock market plunged, and then bounced back. Hurt, yes, but shares were not beaten, even as investors had to worry about the double whammy of concerns of nuclear contamination in Japan and a housing report [...]
Bill Gross says sell (Photo: Jason Reed/Reuters) US debt may no longer be a good investment, at least for now. And that might be the good news. Famed investor Bill Gross, who runs the PIMCO Total Return Fund, recently sold all of the US Treasury bonds is his fund’s portfolio. It’s a huge move for [...]
Here’s another data point that gold and other things that are supposed to trade up when inflation spikes are in a bubble: The prices of books about hyperinflation are themselves hyperinflated (from Fortune): Jens O. Parsson’s out of print economic treatise, Dying of Money: Lessons of the Great German and American Inflations, is selling for [...]
Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research Center has a study out this month about the cost of 401(k) plans, and they have found another flaw in the nation’s defacto retirement savings system: It is overpriced. So not only do 401(k) plans not meet the needs of the average American, they aren’t cost effective either. I [...]
It’s a long held mantra on Wall Street to buy straw hats in winter. The notion is that you should buy the shares of a company when no body wants them, or when things look their worst. Buy at the low. So based on that logic here’s the question: Is BP’s stock a buy? That’s [...]
