Germany is getting hit with the nasty combination of deflation and higher energy costs as it follows California’s lead in shifting to renewable energy. Although other factors may be contributing to its economic decline, Germany’s transition from coal and nuclear energy to wind and solar renewable energy sources is forcing industries and consumers to pay substantially higher prices.
Southern California Edison (SCE) announced a “transition effort” that will dump 500 employees and replace them presumably cheaper H-1B visa holders imported from India. Many laid-off employees are complaining that in a demoralizing betrayal, some laid-off workers are being assigned to train their India replacements on how to do their jobs.
Thanks to sponsorship by Google, California has become the “tip of the spear” for the United Nations’ Environmental Programme (UNEP) to create a world in the next 30 years where all decision making will be controlled by environmental, social and governance policies (ESG). On Feb. 2, 2015, Google hosted U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx to unveil the 30-year plan to implement the UN- and Google-backed initiative.
Apple already has a strong relationship with Yahoo as the default data source on the iPhone for the device’s very slick stocks and weather apps. After Alibaba’s September public offering gave Yahoo billions in cash, Mayer appears willing to go to war with Google to bring search dominance back to Yahoo.
Instead of paying the record-breaking $4.5 million for a 30-second Super Bowl XLIX ad in hopes of going viral, Tesla apparently leaked a cell phone video of its blazingly fast Model X crossover, ripping it on a California pier and dominating downloads over the weekend.
Newsweek never recovered from withholding the publication of investigative reporter Michael Isikoff’s expose of an alleged sexual relationship between President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in early January 1998. But 17 years later, and two sales of the magazine for $1 each time, the new owners
After Apple (AAPL) reported that it had sold $74.6 billion in products and earned a record corporate profit of $18.04 billion profit in a single quarter, Samsung Electronics admitted Thursday that much of Apple’s gain came at its expense. Korea’s former corporate juggernaut reported its lowest annual profit since 2011, with a 32% drop in quarterly profit, to $21.3 billion.
The ultimate professional insult to a CEO is to be fired and then watch your former company’s stock jump 3.5% on the announcement. That was the story for Don Thompson, who was dumped by McDonald’s Corporation (MCD) late Wednesday.
Apple (AAPL: NASDAQ) may have printed the largest quarterly earnings in the history of capitalism, but the smartphone market is moving against the future of the Apple iPhone as Google’s Android operating system software gains market domination.
California’s commercial and industrial energy costs are about 37% higher than the national average in the continental United States due to Governor Brown’s 33% sustainable energy mandate. And with rates 41% to 46% higher in San Diego County than the national average, local investment and job growth are being hammered.
In a desperate attempt at relevance, President Barack Obama thought he could pay for two promised years of free community college tuition by eliminating the tax exemption on middle-class 529 college-savings accounts. Although the Administration argued that the 529 accounts disproportionately benefit higher-income families, disenfranchising 11.6 million accounts was seen as just short of a declaration of war on “the family.” This afternoon Obama dumped his tax plan.
Marissa Mayer appears to be gaining traction in a turnaround of an Internet pioneer that most of Wall Street thought would be impossible.
According to California state officials, it is a disaster that vehicles are getting better mileage. Heaven forbid that as the most impoverished state, Californians would pay lower state gas taxes for politicians to spend. To protect the Legislature’s slurp at
In a report entitled “Immigrants Tend to Live in High Welfare Benefit States,” published on Jan. 26, 2015, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) determined that “the generous welfare benefits offered by some states have magnetic effects and alter the geographic sorting of immigrants in the United States”–attracting many to California.
On Sunday, the Center for Biological Diversity held a public forum at the San Jose City Hall to educate residents about what they believe are the dangers of so called oil-trains. According to the Center, tar sands oil and heavy crudes that will be brought in from Canada are most toxic, carbon intensive and dirtiest fuels on the planet.
Cabernet sauvignon grapes from California’s Napa Valley have been among the most prized on earth for fine wine, justifying the cost per bottle of $100 or more. But it seems that one of the area’s top master blenders for elite brands has been fooling
Insolvent Greece is at the center of the European Financial Crisis that has led to a 20 percent devaluation of the exchange rate of the euro against the U.S. dollar. Polls indicate that in parliamentary elections on Sunday, the main leftist and center-right parties will finish one and two.
The European Central Bank (ECB) gave the Left and their allies meeting in Davos, Switzerland, everything they could have hoped for with the announcement that they have agreed to print $1.13 trillion of new cash to buy the national debt of their insolvent members. But “hidden within the announcement is evidence of Germany’s weakening commitment to the European project,” according to Stratfor.
Apple, Google, Adobe and Intel, whose politics are often to the far left, have agreed to pay $415 million to resolve a class-action lawsuit alleging they conspired as an illegal cartel to suppress tech workers’ wages through secret “non-poaching” agreements involving 64,000 employees.
Eric Schmidt told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week that “the Internet will disappear.” As he was speaking, The Information, The Verge and the Wall Street Journal reported that Google plans to run a new wireless service that resells the wireless services it already buys wholesale from the Sprint and T-Mobile networks. Google, Sprint and T-Mobile all declined to confirm or deny the reports.
Facebook intends to use this knowledge to develop algorithms that can “scalably” silence what it deems to be “noise” in users’ accounts. But what they are really after is to hide un-paid crap, to free up more user space for the good Facebook-paid crap.
President Barack Obama in his State of the Union speech said, “The verdict is clear, middle class economics works.” Obama said lots of words about how the U.S. economy has improved, but he avoided the “numbers” regarding how or if that improvement had reached the middle class. If the president had used the “numbers,” he would have to explain why real middle class paychecks hit a 50 year low on his watch.
Despite California having the largest manufacturing base in the nation, the state is growing high-paying manufacturing jobs at only one seventh of the U.S. average. The culprit in this debacle is Governor Brown’s wildly expensive alternative energy mandates that stab industrial manufacturers with electrical costs that are about double the U.S. average.
China’s Shanghai futures market crashed by the maximum 10 percent, and trading was suspended on January 19th, while Shanghai Composite Index fell by 7.7 percent. Both events were the worst day of trading since shortly after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy launched the financial crisis six years ago.
Despite living in a globalized economy, unions film crews charge a “distant location” surcharge for filming outside of the so-called 30-Mile Zone (TMZ) compared to places closer to Hollywood.
Jerry Brown might try to claim credit for rising employment, home values and personal and corporate income. But California’s growth has been due partly to the importation of impoverished foreign immigrants, driving the state’s highest annual population growth rate in nearly a decade, according to the state’s finance department.
The former Portuguese colony of Macau took in $45 billion in gambling revenues in 2013, up 20% from the prior year and nearly seven times the action on the Las Vegas strip. But in the last six months, China’s President Xi Jinping has devastated the “Monte Carlo of the Orient” as he accelerates his anti-corruption campaign against vast layers of entrenched officials. Xi hopes his purge will deflect blame away from the Communist Party as China suffers its worst economic crisis in two decades.
Attorney General Eric Holder announced he is terminating the Justice Department’s three-decade-old civil asset forfeiture program called Equitable Sharing that allowed state and local law enforcement agencies to keep 80% of cash, vehicles, real estate and other assets seized under federal drug laws before formal warrants or criminal charges were filed.
The White House dropped a bombshell on Thursday by announcing that FCC already has the authority to take over regulating and taxing the Internet without Congressional approval.
The European Constitutional Court of Justice ruled the European Central Bank (ECB) has unlimited authority to massively inflate the euro. The Swiss National Bank (SNB) was forced to drop its fixed exchange rate for the nation’s “franc” currency.
The California Public Employee Retirement System (CalPERS) has announced that its solvency has improved and that it is only $89.7 billion underfunded. Unfortunately, CalPERS’s purported solvency of percentage of 77% assumes the fantasy that it can conservatively compound its annual earnings at 7.5% without any losses. But if CalPERS only earns 4.5% a year–a rate conservative private pensions often shoot for–the fund’s long-term liability is a staggering $290 billion.
Last February, the New York Times editorial writer Joe Nocera raged against “The Bitcoin Blasphemy,” which he claimed was libertarian “sacrilege” since it is “unconnected to any currency or any government.” But try as they might, the leftist thought police at the Times that see bitcoin as an existential threat to “full faith” in the dollar and the U.S. government are failing.
With California facing what Steven Greenhut calls “Death by Pension,” former Democrat Speaker of the California Assembly and newly elected State Senator Bob Hertzberg released details of his Senate Bill 8 tax manifesto. What he refers to as the “Upward
Cuba should be a bountiful island with an excellent growing season. But the workers’ paradise has to import $2 billion in food each year to prevent the workers from starving. American farmers have been able to get a small piece of the market since food sales were allowed as an exemption to the 1962 trade embargo in 2000. But with Obama Administration moving to normalize relationships, California, as America’s top food producing state, looks forward to serving a market of 11 million new consumers.
Most national security analysts had assumed that both of the Paris terrorist attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo by the Kouachi brothers and the shooting of a policewoman and attack on a kosher market by Amedy Coulibaly had been sponsored by al-Qaeda as one-upmanship in their rivalry with the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). But after his death in a shoot-out, a video was released indicating Coulibaly was on an ISIS mission.
“Anonymous from around the world have decided to declare war against you, terrorists,” an affiliated member of the underground hacktivist movement threatened in a new video posted on YouTube as a response to the Paris attack on the Charlie Hebdo
China’s Producer Price Index (PPI) that measures the price changes for the goods and services produced by the nation has fallen for 32 straight months. As the factory to the world, China has been exporting deflation. The economic impact has been increasing the real burden of debt, driving down worldwide wages and discouraging consumption.
California Gov. Jerry Brown’s supposed “balanced budget” has no provision for another million illegal aliens.
Governor Jerry Brown triumphantly unveiled a record $113 billion state budget this week that increases spending by 5%, with promises to give a boast to K-12 schools, deposit $1.2 billion into the rainy day fund, and make a $1.2 billion debt payment. Yet he barely mentioned that healthcare costs for Covered Care, Medi-Cal and retirees are on fire and are sure to burn down California in the next recession.
There will always be rumors in the stock market, but a Twitter-Yahoo deal would make more complimentary sense than most of the usual market chatter.