More Americans are in favour of their government cutting down on its spending to balance the national budget rather than trying to do so by increasing the tax rate for the wealthy, revealed an Associated Press-GfK poll on Friday, as Republican and Democratic politicians continue to debate over the merits of either move.
The European Commission has said in a report that the region’s divergent economies are staring at a bleak outlook, with a mild recession at the horizon that could turn far worse.
The 17-nation euro economy will contract 0.3 percent, the commission said, abandoning a November forecast of 0.5 percent growth. The downgrade was mainly due to projected contractions of 1.3 percent in Italy and 1 percent in Spain.
Olli Rehn, European Union Economic and Monetary Commissioner said:
Technology giant Apple Inc currently has more money than it would need to run the company, said its CEO Tim Cook during an annual shareholders’ meeting in Cupertino, California on Thursday.
The company has long had a history of stockpiling its cash profits, claimed the Associated Press on Thursday, as former CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs had believed in saving as much as money as possible due to the deep financial problems that Apple had faced during the mid-1990s.
As the United States gets into the swing of an election-year, President Barack Obama has offered to cut corporate tax rate 28 percent, a move that commentators have said is a direct challenge to his Republican rivals.
President Obama’s long-awaited business tax plan, if passed, would lower the corporate tax rate from the current 35 percent to 28 percent.
Calling the current tax system “outdated, unfair, and inefficient”, Obama said:
Citigroup faces a potential multibillion dollar write-down on its minority equity stake in Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, an asset management business.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the venture between Citigroup and Morgan Stanley began in 2009, when the sides combined Citigroup’s Smith Barney with Morgan Stanley’s wealth-management unit.
Morgan Stanley has the right to start buying Citigroup out this spring and is expected to take full ownership in 2014.
Bank of America Corp, the second largest bank in the US by assets, is planning to quicken the pace of its expansion in China, claimed Bloomberg BusinessWeek on Thursday, after the company doubled its profits last year.
Switzerland is set to introduce more tax obligation requirements for foreign clients of its banking industry in the future, said the country’s Finance Ministry on Wednesday, in an attempt to clean up its image as a haven for overseas tax evasion.
In a deal to extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits, Congress has passed a law that would soon allow states to conduct drug-tests before handing out payments.
While the Republicans initially wanted to extend the drug-tests to all unemployment benefit applicants, the new law would only allow the tests to be conducted on people who were fired from their last job for drugs, or anyone seeking jobs that would already require a drug test.
Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor has opened its first European plant in Bulgaria as it aims to boost sales of its Great Wall Hover SUV, and other select models, in the region.
In a partnership with Bulgaria’s Litex Motors, the factory in the northern village of Bahovitsa will initially produce 4,000 vehicles a year using China-imported kits, rising to 50,000 by 2013.
Great Wall’s president and chief executive Feng Yingwang said:
A group of female college students in China are taking a unique spin of the Occupy movement spreading across the world, by protesting – both within and outside male’s bathrooms – what they perceive to be gender inequality in the country’s toilet offerings.
Li Maizi (an alias), a student in a Xi’an college, started the movement after she had been frustrated by the long wait taken to use a female bathroom while at a conference in Guangzhou; and began to plan to protest to call for the government to provide more toilet stalls for women.
