Tag Archives: Economy
Credit card changes benefit consumers
A CARD Act change ensures that extra sums are applied to the balance with the highest interest rate first. This is good for consumers because they end up paying less in interest on their total card debt over the long term.
Ralph E. Stone Global News Centre
(SAN FRANCISCO) The Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD Act) changed how credit card issuers must apply your credit card payments.
Who will be America’s next President?
Trying to answer the question of who will be our next President is a little scary. Just exactly who will be our next Commander in Chief? Who really has the best ideas and the leadership ability to pull this country together and save us from going the way of Greece?
Dr. Glenn Mollette Global News Centre
(NEWBURGH, Indiana) Most Americans cannot tell you how many Republicans are running for President. If they are like me at this point, they don’t care. I suppose if ten more people announce their candidacy we would just nod our heads sort of like Linda Blair did in the movie The Exorcist. If you didn’t see the movie it wasn’t pretty.
Let’s hear it for Canadian humor… an evening at the Diefenbaker Awards
The world’s humor is perhaps the highest product of our civilization… the mingled heritage of tears and laughter that is our lot on earth.
- Stephen Leacock
William Annett Global News Centre
(DAYTONA BEACH) It was not too long ago – the last U.S. presidential election cycle, to be exact - that Clint Eastwood starred at the Republican convention by mouthing obscenities to an empty chair, and a Democratic observer commented “That’s what you get when you cut Medicare to old geezers.” But my reaction was more cosmopolitan. It suddenly dawned on me: “I don’t care what they say, Canadian humor is not that bad.”
Trumpworld
While Trump won’t become the GOP nominee, he certainly is making the Republican party a bit nervous.
Ralph E. Stone Global News Centre
(SAN FRANCISCO) Phineas T. Barnum, showman and founder of the Barnum & Bailey Circus, supposedly once said, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” With this quote in mind, consider that Donald Trump is garnering more publicity — good or bad depending on your viewpoint — than all the other presidential candidates combined. Or maybe it just seems that way.
Is Bernie Sanders really the only Socialist running for president?
mrctv.org
Bernie Sanders proudly calls himself a socialist. Everyone knows where he stands on the issues. He doesn’t consult pollsters before taking a stand.
Allan Brownfeld Global News Centre
(WASHINGTON DC) Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is attracting a great deal of interest in his challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. In New Hampshire, he has been less than ten points behind Clinton in some polls and he has been attracting impressive crowds in Iowa, New Hampshire and elsewhere.
As Congress considered trade legislation, Clinton ducked questions about the bill while Sanders, who opposed the legislation, said it was embarrassing to see the party’s leading candidate hide from the biggest issues of the day. In Sanders’s view, “You can be for it or against it . But I don’t understand how on an issue of such huge consequences you don’t have an opinion.”
The one-sided see-saw… let’s hear it for capitalism
pearlsofprofundity.wordpress.com
A holding company is the people you give your money to while you’re being searched.
- Will Rogers
William Annett Global News Centre
(DAYTONA BEACH) Everybody talks about capitalism but nobody has done anything about it, recently. Except maybe for Richard D. Wolff, in a long interview with David Barsamian, resulting in a book called “Occupy The Economy: Challenging Capitalism.” That may make sense because in the last few years we’ve occupied just about everything else.
A strange thing happened on the way out of the Great Depression. Franklin Roosevelt actually saved capitalism by trashing it. Well, not entirely. Roosevelt enacted legislation to hobble the destructive tendency of capitalism’s excesses, while at the same time creating “entitlements” (as they say these days), and forcing the top 1% to pick up the tab through personal and corporate taxes.
Banking on the banksters… the leveraged buyout of America
I never saw a city boy yet who was worth a damn. - Ernest Hemingway
William Annett Global News Centre
(DAYTONA BEACH) Ellen Hodgson Brown, a West Coast writer with a law degree, or perhaps more accurately, an attorney who likes to write in order to right, is one of the few people around who talks sense about banksters in general, central banking in particular and the international excuse for both that prevails these days.
She talks about the leveraged buyout of America, how giant “bancorps,” as they like to style themselves, perhaps because it sounds so new-worldy cool, have gluttonized to the point where they own just about everything private and public: airports and other ports, acres of green plants and even larger power plants, mammoth inventories of financial “products” including derivatives and commodities, relating to everything from plutonium to sowbellies. In a word, they are systematically picking up all the honey bee chips, and with them total control of the economy itself.
A pot-pourri: in which we ramble… remembering Alan Abelson in defense of the Vatican bank and hindcasting the financial markets
Barron’s Alan Abelson: 1925 to 2013 Courtesy: online.barrons.com
Sinners who live in glass confessionals shouldn’t. - Recent Papal Bull
William Annett Global News Centre
(DAYTONA BEACH) get some of my best material from three-year-old news. I was reminded of that recently when all the media, looking for something to fill the boring post-Christmas news cycle, or lack thereof, pulled one of those “Memorable things that happened last year” features. So I thought that it might be even better to consider the last three years, and that led me to the principal of market hindcasting, proselytizing the idea from the hurricane industry. It’s like forecasting, only backwards.
One of the biggies three years ago happened in the spring.
Margaret Hamburg, MD submits resignation as Commissioner of FDA. Is a scandal awaiting to be exposed?
Hamburg
Before Dr. Hamburg was confirmed as Commissioner of the FDA in 2009, she and her husband, Peter Fitzhugh Brown had to divest themselves of several hedge-fund holdings as well as some of Mr. Brown’s inherited drug-company stocks so Dr. Hamburg could take the post as the nation’s top food and drug regulator.
Marianne Skolek Global News Centre
(MYRTLE BEACH) Early this morning it was reported that Margaret Hamburg, MD, Commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), was resigning her position this week, after “serving” the American people for 6 years in safeguarding their health. It was later reported that Hamburg would be leaving the FDA at the end of March 2015.
I have been reporting on Dr. Hamburg for the past several years and have asked for her termination as commissioner for her ties to the pharmaceutical industry resulting in unprecedented deaths and addictions to prescription opioids leading to the heroin epidemic destroying families throughout the U.S.
When Paul met Larry…
Ben Bernanke photo courtesy: theguardian.com
The Prophet of Princeton and the summers of our discontent
William Annett Global News Centre
(DAYTONA BEACH) A year or so ago, when Ben Bernanke completed his tenure as Chairman of The Federal Reserve and moved back to Princeton, like Cincinnatus going back to the plow, another Princeton Prof, Paul Krugman, was squaring off with Larry Summers, the former Secretary of the Treasury, who was destined to lose out to Janet Yellen in the presidential selection of Bernanke’s successor. A small world, you might say.
Greece at a crossroads
Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras Greece’s new prime minister.
Greece and the Syriza Party are at a crossroads — short term populism or stay the austerity course.
Ralph E. Stone Global News Centre
(SAN FRANCISCO) The far-left anti-austerity Syriza Party has agreed to a coalition deal with the Independent Greeks giving the Syriza Party a majority and thus power in Greece.
Greece had slipped into near bankruptcy primarily because of widespread tax evasion and corruption. The “brutal austerity” imposed on Greece as a condition of $273 billion in Eurozone bailouts since 2010 has actually been working slowly but surely. The economy has been growing and unemployment is down.
