|
|||||
|
More than $92 million in bonuses averaging $5,500 per employee have been handed out by IRS executives to thousands of the tax agency’s employees since 2009, according to data obtained by The Washington Examiner. The average annual salary of the employees receiving at least one bonus during the four-year period between 2009 and 2012 was slightly less than $94,000, indicating that the extra tax dollars mostly went to managers and executives eligible [...] from FT: So, more drugs to deal with our collective lack of growth. The Bank of England’s Funding for Lending extension is welcome: the scheme lasts longer than before, contains extra incentives to lend to cash-strapped small and medium-sized enterprises and has been widened to include non-bank sources of credit, including financial leasing corporations. And after some remarkably soggy eurozone data – including purchasing manufacturers index figures suggesting that the German economy is [...] Brand new story from NPR as of March 22, 2013; a well-researched and all-around epic investigation into how the Feds are hiding the unemployed: “Scotty, I’m gonna be honest with you,” the guy told him. “There’s nobody gonna hire you … We’re just hiding you guys.” The staff member’s advice to Scott was blunt: “Just suck all the benefits you can out of the system until everything is gone, and then you’re on your own.” http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ First [...] Looking to buy a new car, truck or crossover? You may find it more difficult to stretch the household budget than you expected, according to a new study that finds median-income families in only one major U.S. city actually can afford the typical new vehicle. The typical new vehicle is now more expensive than ever, averaging $30,500 in 2012, according to TrueCar.com data, and heading up again as makers curb [...] by Jim Swift, Weekly Standard: Obama and Biden revealed their proposed reforms intended to reduce firearms related violence. The proposal contains a mix of executive actions, regulations, and calls for Congress to act legislatively. The total package will cost at least $4.5 billion in new spending. Among the new spending the president proposed: • $4 billion for the president’s proposal “to help keep 15,000 cops on the streets in cities and towns across the [...] Wynton Hall Common ground is hard to come by in Washington these days, but everyone, it seems, hates tax “loopholes.” Democrats claim they rob the government of revenue and benefit the rich. Republicans say tax loopholes distort free markets by letting the government pick winners and losers, thereby potentially introducing artificial and undesirable incentives. Indeed, during the 2012 presidential race, Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan attacked tax loopholes for [...] … The extension of the tax incentive allows for all film productions, including each individual episode of a television series, to a deduction of between $15 million and $20 million depending on the location of the production, reported Breitbart… http://www.newsmax.com/US/Hollywood-incentives-tax-Obama/2013/01/01/id/469676 there is another story here about tax breaks for dems biggest supporters: http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin… “Obama’s Tax Evaders of the Year” As we all know here in the US there are a lot if changes that could happen December 31 due to the agreement president Obama made to raise the debt ceiling. This could be catastrophic and weaken our already fragile economy. Debt can be reduced if the best decisions are made to stimulate the economy and promote spending and money making by Anericans whole decreasing spending and dollar wasting by [...] When the federal government began providing billions of dollars in incentives to push hospitals and physicians to use electronic medical and billing records, the goal was not only to improve efficiency and patient safety, but also to reduce health care costs. But, in reality, the move to electronic health records may be contributing to billions of dollars in higher costs forMedicare, private insurers and patients by making it easier for hospitals [...] The Fantasy of Debt: No Trade-Offs, No Sacrifices by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog, Easy, cheap credit has created a fantasy world where everyone “deserves” everything right now, and trade-offs and sacrifice have been banished as unnecessary. Debt offers a compelling fantasy: there is no need for difficult trade-offs or sacrifices, everything can be bought and enjoyed now. In the old days when credit was scarce and dear, buying a better auto required substituting 1,000 [...] Dr Webster Tarpley on problems & solutions – Infowars nightly news 2012-08-14 WW3 is imminent How do you stop a world recession/depression? Could be used by shops to offer discounts to customers Users must sign up to take part and ‘teach’ system what they look like Shoppers could soon be automatically recognised when they walk into a shop using a controversial new camera. Called Facedeals, the camera uses photos uploaded to Facebook to recognise people as they walk in. Shoppers who agree to use the system, which has [...] When spending rewards dollars on things like knife sets, LCD TVs and restaurant reservations is just a little too 2011, here comes Citi to spice things up a bit. Consumerist tries to make some sense of Citi rewards’ incentives… and fails: “Is there no limit to what banking rewards programs will cover these days? Flights, hotel rooms, rental cars, electronics, women. Wait — what? Consumerist reader F. is a member of Citi’s Extra [...] From Economic Policy Journal: The most dangerous and evil bastard in the White House, Cass Sunstein, is leaving his WH post, reports WSJ. WSJ states that: Mr. Sunstein has long been an advocate of behavorial economics in setting policy, the notion that people will respond to incentives, and has argued for restraint in government regulations. As such, he was met with skepticism and opposition by some liberals when he was chosen at the start of [...] We previously observed that the US Treasury, under advisement of TBAC Chairman Matt Zames, who currently runs JPM’s CIO group in the aftermath of the London #FailWhale and who will become the next JPM CEO after Jamie Dimon decides he has had enough of competing with the Fed over just who it is that run the US capital markets, would soon commence issuing Floating Rate bonds (here andhere) as well as [...] We discussed the use of Game Theory as a useful tool for analyzing Europe’s predicament in February and noted that it was far from optimal for any (peripheral or core) sovereign to pre-emptively ‘agree’ to austerity or Eurobonds respectively (even though that would make both better off). This Prisoner’s Dilemma left the ugly Nash-Equilibrium game swinging from a catastrophic break-up to a long, painful (and volatile) continuation of the crisis. Recent work by BofAML’s [...] In the wake of Facebook’s botched initial public offering and subsequent stock decline, pressure is building for CEO Mark Zuckerberg to post solid results when the social giant reports second quarter earnings on Thursday. For a 29-year old wunderkind who’s had a notoriously ‘disruptive’ relationship with Wall Street, it likely won’t be an easy task. The first potential stumbling block: Accounting. The company will incur a massive charge as it lifts restrictions on employee stock in [...] SEX! Economic researchers at Yale managed to successfully train Capuchin monkeys to understand Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, Unlike other countries, Israel has a military option planned against Iran, French President Francois Hollande told the Hebrew daily Maariv on Saturday. A second French official said Israel would humiliate Iran if the two engaged in a military conflict. According to the report published on Sunday, the French president is in favor of strengthening the sanctions against Tehran while simultaneously offering the Iranian regime incentives to stop its nuclear program and “rejoin” the international community. Hollande [...] In an extended interview with Bloomberg TV, Nouriel Roubini lives up to his doom-saying reputation and goes where few have as he opines on Lieborgate that: “bankers are greedy and have been for 1000 years” and “nothing is going to change” unless there are criminal sanctions; to which he follows up – briefly silencing the interviewer, “If some people end up in jail, maybe that will teach a lesson to somebody – or somebody will [...] From FT: Remember last year when China was fretting about inflation? CPI hit 6.5 per cent in July, stoking talk of serious overheating and civil unrest. What a difference a year makes. Last month, Chinese inflation dropped to 3 per cent. Now, says Dong Tao of Credit Suisse, China looks to be more troubled by deflation. And that could damage the economy for years to come. China has taken clear steps to respond to the [...] We’ll get the latest monetary policy decision from the European Central Bank at 7:45 AM ET, perhaps the biggest decision for the bank since it announced a rate cut and two three-year LTROs in December.
While most analysts polled by Bloomberg believe the bank will hold rates steady at 1.00 percent, numerous economic indicators (euro area inflation, M3, and PMIs, to name a few) that could induce the Bank to loosen monetary policy. Further, chatter and [...] From FT: The way in which the Bankia – and other – cases have been managed over the past few weeks confirms that banking supervision in the euro area cannot continue to be implemented in a decentralised way. The incentives of the From FT: Germany refused to share the debt burden of stressed eurozone peers on Tuesday, ignoring two of the most influential international economic bodies which offered support for proposals championed by Paris, Rome and Brussels ahead of a summit. Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, has argued that any co-mingling of eurozone debt would remove incentives for southern economies to adopt structural reforms. The calls from the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development came on [...] We already relayed Deutsche Bank’s star assessment of the Greek vote, which in a nutshell goes like this: The odds that the current bailout program can go through unscathed is very low.
Deutsche’s language is very severe, and calls the election a clear negative surprise for markets. Goldman has basically the same assessment, but the language from Themistoklis Fiotakis is a bit more polite. In short, while incentives are still in place for mainline Greek [...] Video documentation by local activists and independent media shows that police officers and county deputies from across Minnesota have been picking up young people near Peavey Plaza for a training program to recognize drug-impaired drivers. Multiple participants say officers gave them illicit drugs and provided other incentives to take the drugs. The Occupy Wall Street movement, present at Peavey Plaza since April 7th, appears to be targeted as impaired people [...] Wendy McElroy Last week, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) extended its reach and tightened its grip on every cent Americans earn or try to preserve anywhere in the world. The final regulations of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) were announced. Enacted in March 2010 as part of the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment (HIRE) Act, FATCA seeks to have foreign financial institutions report on accounts held by any [...] from the you-don’t-price-based-on-your-bloated-infrastructure dept With the legal dispute over ebook pricing going on, one thing we’ve heard over and over again from the traditional publishing industry and their supporters is that higher prices for ebooks make sense because of all of the “costs” that the publishers have to cover. This is a fundamental error in how pricing (and economics) works. It reminds me of the MPAA folks who demand to know the business [...] |
Custom Search
    |
||||
|
Copyright © 2013 InvestmentWatch - All Rights Reserved |
|||||
