Commissioner David Stern cancelled the first two weeks of the new NBA season on Monday night, after the league and the players failed to reach a deal to end a four-month-long lockout. At dispute is how to divide billions of dollars of league revenues, as well as league rules over how players are paid. The NBA will lose between $700-$800 million for each month of play lost.
China celebrates its 90th year of Communist rule today; but in the background, the nation is playing deeply capitalist games with international debts. China owns a large portion of US debt, but a Reuters investigation shows that they may have more than the Treasury could previously report. By buying up US debt through internationally disparate financial intermediaries, Chinese entities hid exactly how much US debt they had acquired—estimates say it is above $1.13 trillion.
Greece is preparing this morning to vote on drastic austerity measures that have sparked nationwide strikes and rioting in the country's capital, Athens. 5,000 police were deployed to Athens over the past two days, to combat protesters with tear gas. Meanwhile, the climate inside Parliament is calm as they prepare to vote. If the austerity measures pass, Greece will be able to obtain a second bail-out from the European Union, and avoid defaulting.
Volatile food prices are making the survival of the small farmer in developing countries nearly impossible. As the developed world weathers the storms of rising food prices through sophisticated commodities markets, smaller operations in Latin America, Asia and Africa are left to the mercy of massive price fluctuations.
European Union Commission President Jose Manuel Borroso believes next week will be the "moment of truth" for the Greek government. Prime Minister Papandreou is facing a tough battle to secure parliamentary backing for further austerity measures. The economic instability continues to cause ripples across the world—including here in the U.S. within the Greek-American community.
Nassim Taleb is the philosopher and former trader who correctly predicted that the mathematical models Wall Street used to measure risk would lead to a massive financial crisis. His new book, ‘The Bed of Procrustes,’ scrutinizes the economy, as well as human knowledge and values. The book features "practical and philosophical aphorisms," and includes fortune-cookie sized sentences that attempt to "expose self-delusions you have been living with but have never recognized."
When it comes to brands you find in the laundry aisle, Tide has been reinvented about a million different ways, whether as a more concentrated detergent formula, into a stain remover, or a fabric softener. There is one area of the laundry industry that has historically been very hard to corner nationally, however. Tide's parent company, Proctor and Gamble, now intends to take the brand into...dry cleaning. Can a major company like Tide replace mom-and-pop?
The current Postmaster General is retiring this week with a nearly $5.5 million retirement package. The U.S. Postal Service has lost over 100,000 jobs and about $8.5 billion over the past decade. The numbers do not look good, and as electronic communication leeches away more and more business, they're not expected to improve. So, what should be done with the USPS?
The G20 Summit started earlier today in Seoul, South Korea, and high among the story lines we're watching is the economic skirmishing between China and the U.S. The U.S. has long been critical of how China has dealt with its currency, accusing China's central banks with keeping the RMB artificially low. China and other countries, meanwhile, are not happy with some of the White House's fiscal policies, most recently the Fed's plan to pump $600 billion back into the sluggish U.S. economy.
Census Data from the years 2002 - 2007 show that the number of minority owned businesses in the US rose by 46 percent during those five years, to about 5.8 million. That's nearly twice the national rate for all businesses during that time.
After the bottom nearly dropped out of the international climate summit in Copenhagen six months ago, some say don’t expect much, if anything, to come out of a similar summit beginning today in Bonn, Germany. The main challenges on coming to an agreement remain, and one of the big questions is: How should rich economies help poor countries deal with climate change?
We take look at what's ahead this week with Marcus Mabry of The New York Times and Rob Watson of the BBC. This week, the U.S. and Russia sign a new arms treaty, Treasury Secretary Geithner visits India, and a date will be selected for elections in the United Kingdom. Plus, Tiger Woods returns to the green.
Later today we expect to hear new national unemployment data which should offer economists a reasonable idea of where our economy is moving on a macro scale. But what about the smaller economic engines of America? How about the small towns in our country that may be largely sustained by a single industry or plant? Even if the economy, as a whole, were to make an unexpected recovery, that wouldn’t bring back the single manufacturing plant that sustaining some ten percent of its nearby residents, or the auxiliary economy that springs up around it like housing, restaurants, or shopping centers.
As European nations in the Iberian Peninsula fall deeper into debt, the U.S. markets came tumbling down on Thursday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing just above 10,000 points. All this comes hours before new jobless numbers are released.
Many products we buy now come with labels that read “Made in China” or Japan or India, rather than the U.S.A. Minnesota tried to change that by implementing a law requiring state agencies to buy uniforms and safety equipment made in this country.
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