NewsTrust - All Rated Stories

USA Inc.: Red, White, and Very Blue

Sat, 26 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Business Week - By Mary Meeker - Feb. 26 (Special Report) - The bottom line on USA Inc.? Cash flow and net worth are negative, profits are rare, and off-balance-sheet liabilities are enormous. The "company" has underinvested in productive capital, education, and technology—the very tools needed to compete in the global marketplace. Lenders have been patient so far, but the sky-high rates on the sovereign debt of Greece, Ireland, and Portugal suggest what might lie ahead for USA Inc. shareholders and our children. By our rough estimate, USA Inc. has a net worth of negative $44 trillion. That comes to $143,000 per capita. Negative. To be fair, the net worth calculation leaves out some assets, including, most importantly, the power to tax. Which simply means that the government can improve its own finances by worsening those of its citizen-shareholders. Medicare and Medicaid are the crushers for USA Inc. Excluding them and one-time charges, the "core business" shows a median net profit margin of 4 percent over the past 15 years. USA Inc.'s core operations were in surplus nine of those years. In the early years of the Republic, the only entitlements were military pensions. The big change came with the 1930s and World War II, when the federal government substantially expanded its role in the economy (in effect, its "business lines"). Entitlements experienced a surge in the Great Society of the 1960s. Since 1965, the nation's gross domestic product has increased about 2.7 times over, but entitlement expenses have increased 11.1 times over. What do Americans have to show for it? Evidence suggests that when the government provides, families do less for themselves: There is an 82 percent correlation between rising entitlement spending and falling personal savings rates. With the aging of my baby boom generation, things will get even worse.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average - 7 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Secondhand Smoke Tied to High Blood Pressure in Kids

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 12:39:01 -0800

Business Week - Jan. 11 - TopNews Arab EmiratesSecondhand Smoke Tied to High Blood Pressure in KidsBusinessWeekMONDAY, Jan. 10 (HealthDay News) -- Young kids who live with a parent who smokes face an increased risk for developing high blood pressure while still children, a new study has found. Warning that children with high blood pressure often ...Second Hand Smoking Raises Children's Blood Pressure.KidGlueParents' Smoking Is a Risk Factor for Childrens High BPDoctors LoungeKids with smoking parents have high BPTimes of IndiaDaily Health Report -TIME -abc7.comall 45 news articles »

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 8 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Repeal of Ban on Gays in Military Nears Senate Vote

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Business Week - Sep. 21 (News) - The Senate plans to vote today on whether to take up defense legislation that would allow repeal of the ban on gays serving openly in the U.S. military.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Milbank Is Latest U.S. Law Firm to Set Up in Brazil

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Business Week - By Alexander Cuadros, Carlyn Kolker - Apr. 20 (News Report) - Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy LLP, a New York law firm, is opening an office in Sao Paulo, Brazil, joining other U.S. firms that have set up shop during the past year in Latin America’s largest economy.

NewsTrust Rating: 2.8 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Geithner Says U.S. Will ‘Never’ Lose Aaa Debt Rating

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Business Week - By Rebecca Christie - Feb. 08 (News Report) - Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said the U.S. is in no danger of losing its Aaa debt rating even though the Obama administration has predicted a $1.6 trillion budget deficit in 2010.

NewsTrust Rating: 2.8 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

As Banks Exit TARP, Obama Seeks New Ways to Boost Credit

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Business Week - By Bradley Keoun - Dec. 17 (News Report) - The Obama Administration didn't waste any time in getting its economic message across to Wall Street. As the last big banks scrambled to return their bailout funds in mid-December, the President summoned top Wall Street chiefs to the White House, urging them to increase lending to companies and individuals. "Now that they're back on their feet, we expect an extraordinary commitment from them to help rebuild our economy," Obama told reporters after the meeting on Dec. 14.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Wall Street Plays Hardball

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Business Week - By Theo Francis - Nov. 24 (Special Report) - Across the nation, local governments and related public entities, already reeling from the recession, face another fiscal crisis: billions of dollars in fees owed to UBS, Goldman Sachs (GS), and other financial giants on investment deals gone wrong.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.3 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Google Voice, AT&T, and the FCC: Fighting Over the Wrong Thing

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Business Week - By Stephen Wildstrom - Oct. 11 (Special Report) - What do Google Voice, AT&T, sex chat lines, and New Deal efforts to provide rural telephone service have do do with each other? Quite a bit, it turns out; the seemingly unrelated issues of sex chat and rural phone service lie at the heart of the

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Mindset of an AIG executive

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Business Week - By Diane Brady - Mar. 25 (News Analysis) - A few things struck me in the “resignation letter” of Jake DeSantis, an executive vice president of the American International Group’s financial products unit. (People don’t normally forward their letters of resignation to The New York Times) First, of course, is his justified sense of outrage at having been abandoned by his boss, AIG chief Ed Liddy, before Congress and at having his bonus essentially taken away. “Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down.” But a few other sentences stand out in my mind as emblematic of the mindset that has created some of this mess.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Wall Street's Economic Crimes Against Humanity

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Shoshana Zuboff - Mar. 22 (Opinion) - The economic crisis is not the Holocaust but, I would argue, it derives from a business model that routinely produced a similar kind of remoteness and thoughtlessness, compounded by a widespread abrogation of individual moral judgment. As we learn more about the behavior within our financial institutions, we see that just about everyone accepted a reckless system that rewards transactions but rejects responsibility for the consequences of those transactions. Bankers, brokers, and financial specialists were all willing participants in a self-centered business model that celebrates what's good for organization insiders while dehumanizing and distancing everyone else - the outsiders.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.4 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Behind the Incredibly Shrinking Media

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Business Week - By Paul Armstrong - Mar. 11 (Comment) - What changed? What went wrong? Nothing. The audience's attention capacity has not shrunk, but the demands on it did — exponentially.... This "new world" brought us massive amounts of information but no new time to digest it, so we cognitively economize and focus on what's required.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.3 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

High Hurdles for Obama's Green Stimulus

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Business Week - By John Carey - Dec. 31 (Special Report) - The scent of fast money in Washington has all manner of corporate interests scrambling to show they can create jobs, especially green ones.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.7 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Online Journalism: Donations Accepted

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Business Week - By Douglas MacMillan - Dec. 25 (Special Report) - A growing number of entrepreneurs and journalism advocates around the country are experimenting with a new type of business model for news: community-funded online journalism.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.1 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Zell's Tribune: The Canary in a Scary Mine

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Business Week - By Jon Fine - Dec. 10 (News Analysis) - For the foreseeable future, Tribune will remain intact (apart from selling the Cubs baseball franchise). Perversely enough, it helps that there's apparently no one willing to offer knockout prices for key assets, and that those assets are declining in value so quickly no one is sure what many of them are worth. If the businesses and deal markets were robust, lenders would be salivating at the thought of breaking up the company. The sheer complexity of the bankruptcy—an $8.2 billion deal requires a lot of lenders—argues for a short-term status quo as well.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.3 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Why America Needs an Economic Strategy

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Business Week - By Michael E. Porter - Nov. 02 (Special Report) - The stark truth is that the U.S. has no long-term economic strategy—no coherent set of policies to ensure competitiveness over the long haul. Strategy embodies clear priorities, based on understanding the strengths we need to preserve and the weaknesses that threaten our prosperity the most. Strategy addresses what to do, but also what not to do. In dealing with a crisis, experience teaches us that steps to address the immediate problem must support a long-term strategy. Yet it is far from clear that we are taking the steps most important to America's long-term economic prosperity.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Dirty Truth About Clean Coal

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Business Week - By Ben Elgin - Jun. 26 (Special Report) - Get ready for the selling of "clean coal." A $40 million industry-sponsored marketing and lobbying campaign has launched, with one national television spot featuring a farmer, a teacher, and a woman in a white lab coat declaring: "I believe"--while a voiceover describes how coal can be burned in an environmentally friendly manner.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.6 average - 7 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

McCain Doubling Down On Military Service

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Business Week - By David Kiley - Jun. 06 (Opinion) - John McCain has begun to respond to Democratic attacks that he a candidate more about war than peace. This new ad, titled: "Safe," includes biography about the McCain family's long military service, including the Senator's own five year captivity. It seems a bit odd to spend 30 seconds talking about military service to try and make the point that "I hate war." But the emphasis on military service is aimed squarely at Hillary Clinton supporters who said they would not vote for Barack Obama. Those voters are overwhelmingly white, working-class men with whom the McCain campaign believes the candidate's military service and family tradition will resonate. It's a risky creative strategy. I would like to see McCain delivering the same message, while, perhaps, walking with a playground of children in the background. The message of the ad is that McCain will keep us safe. But the emphasis on military service feels out of step at a time when it is being proven that the country with the biggest army and the most bombs and tanks doesn't necessarily win in 21st century. Talking about military service experience in a vacuum, staring statically into the camera, doesn't quite make the point.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.1 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Google's Orkut: A World of Ambition

Sun, 18 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Business Week - By Olga Kharif - May. 18 (News Report) - Seizing on Orkut's momentum in Asia and Latin America, Google moves to revamp its social networking site and take aim at Facebook and MySpace

NewsTrust Rating: 3.6 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

What You Don't Know about NAFTA

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Business Week - By Pete Engardio, Geri Smith, Jane Sasseen - Mar. 20 (Special Report) - ... the world has changed so profoundly since 1994 that trying to pin specific job losses and gains directly on Nafta is an exercise in futility. Myriad free-trade deals, from bilateral pacts to the World Trade Organization, have been struck since. Nations in Asia, Latin America, and Central Europe have opened up to foreign investment and have deregulated local industries. China has emerged as the world's workshop. Emerging-market crises and spendthrift U.S. policies have radically revalued currencies time and again.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.7 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Why Exxon Won't Produce More

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Business Week - By Christopher Palmeri - Mar. 20 (Special Report) - Texas-based Exxon is the largest publicly traded company in the energy business. In fact, it's the most profitable company in the history of capitalism, earning a record $40.6 billion on sales of $404 billion last year. Yet even with prices at the pump near all-time highs, Exxon isn't planning on producing any more oil four years from now than it did last year. That means the company's oil output won't even keep pace with its own projections of worldwide oil demand growth of 1.2% a year.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.7 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Yahoo's Unlikely Amigos

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Business Week - By Jon Fine - Jan. 29 (Opinion) - Evidently the newspapers are going to try to partner their way out of it. In this case, "it" is whatever disadvantages the medium faces in the online world

NewsTrust Rating: 3.1 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Most Important Trends of 2007

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 09:28:31 -0800

Business Week - Dec. 11 (Special Report) - Some pretty scary stuff happened this year, from the threat of $100 oil to a meltdown in the housing market. On the other hand, some great old rock bands, like the Police, got back together...

NewsTrust Rating: 2.1 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

LeBron Inc.

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:37:35 -0800

Business Week - By Tim Arango - Nov. 30 (Special Report) - Instead of just lining up endorsements and cashing checks, James is seeking equity in the companies he works with; and he is using his on-court prowess to build a corporation that deals with entities as disparate as Bubblicious and Warren Buffett.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.7 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Is $100 Oil As Lethal As It Looks?

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 07:55:45 -0800

Business Week - Nov. 15 (News Analysis) - Economists are more worried about housing's downturn than oil's upturn, and for good reason. According to the Federal Reserve, the U.S. has roughly $20 trillion in residential real estate wealth. A 10% price decline, which many economists consider plausible, would reduce Americans' wealth by $2 trillion, traumatizing the financial system. It's not a perfect comparison, but a 50 cents increase in the price of a gallon of gasoline would cost the economy less than a tenth as much, about $75 billion a year. One reason oil prices may matter less is that the U.S. is not as dependent on oil as it was in the 1970s. According to Energy Dept. data, the amount of oil and natural gas required to produce the same amount of goods and services has declined 58% since 1973.

NewsTrust Rating: 2.8 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

E-Resistance Blooms in Pakistan

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 10:14:52 -0800

Business Week - By Manjeet Kripalani - Nov. 14 (Special Report) - Pakistan may be under military siege, but its citizens have found a place to make themselves heard through the sophisticated use of the Internet. An unexpected but robust underground e-resistance movement is under way in Pakistan -- from blogs, to flash mobs, to e-mails, to streaming video broadcasts, to cell-phone multimedia and text messages.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.1 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer