Last week I flew into Moscow, arriving at 4:30 p.m. on Dec. 8. It gets dark in Moscow around that time, and the sun doesn’t rise until about 10 a.m. at this time of the year — the so-called Black Days versus White Nights. For anyone used to life closer to the equator, this is…
Wall Street saw the biggest stock swings in two months yesterday as oil volatility dragged the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index further from the record it reached less than two weeks ago. The S&P 500 rose 0.8 percent in the first 30 minutes of trading then sank 1 percent, tracing a 36-point arc that was…
(Photo Credit: Maurizio Pesce) Tuesday – Darden Restaurants Darden Restaurants (DRI) which owns several casual dining chains including its crown jewel Olive Garden, is set to report 3rd quarter earnings on Tuesday, December 16 before the opening bell. Promotional deals including Olive Garden’s eyebrow raising 30 day unlimited pasta pass are expected to drive sales higher…
Microsoft has been joined by various Tech companies such as Apple, Amazon, Cisco, eBay and Verizon along with media companies such as ABC, CNN, Fox News and the Guardian, the largest business organizations, such as the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, as well as privacy groups and leading computer scientists who have all filed…
by L. Randall Wray Dean Baker, everyone’s favorite progressive economist (mine, too), has an interesting take on our unemployment problem. Give more paid vacations. The idea is that if all the employed work less, employers will need to hire the unemployed to produce what the already employed won’t be producing while sunning themselves on Florida’s beaches….
Big Pharma has followed the only avenue left to reap billion-dollar profits: jack up the price of generics. What happens when rapacious cartels run out of billion-dollar-profit products? They jack up the price of what was previously low-cost. And why are they able to raise prices by 388% to 8,000% at will? Because they can. That’s the whole…
Reasons or Excuses? The reasons for the Fed not raising rates keep getting more bizarre and outside the scope of what used to constitute the Fed`s purview. First it was the financial crisis, then it was GDP growth not being up to par, then it was inflation not being robust enough, then it was…
Photo Credit: Tech In Asia – Alexander Rusli (center left), CEO of Indosat Indonesian telco company Indosat, in collaboration with Qatar National Bank (QNB), launched a mobile money ATM card this week, CNN Indonesia reports. The card is integrated with Indosat’s ewallet feature Dompetku, which now claims to be the first mobile money provider in Indonesia with a parallel ATM…
Cheniere Energy, Inc. (LNG – Snapshot Report) plans to raise $11.5 billion in debt for its Corpus Christi export facility and has engaged 18 financial institutions for the same. Following the announcement, shares of Cheniere gained around 1.5% on the NYSE. The company plans to use the funds for development of its Corpus Christi Liquefaction Project in Texas….
China faces epic unintended consequences in its efforts to ‘manage’ everything. As Bloomberg rhetorically asks, what if a central bank cut interest rates and borrowing costs rose? Well that didn’t work out as expected, eh? The reason is simple – the leveraged-speculative surge into Chinese stocks triggered by the “easy” rate-cuts sparked a major rotation from bonds into…
