America’s top 1 percent of households earned 275 percent more in 2007 than they did in 1997, while the poor only saw an 18 percent growth over the same period.
The latest study by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that the income of America’s richest 1 percent grew 275 percent between 1979 and 2007, compared with a 65 percent gain for the top 20 percent, and an 18 percent gain for the bottom 20 percent.
It costs the state of New Jersey more money to incarcerate just one inmate in prison for a year than to fund one Princeton’s student tuition fees during the same period in college. Across the US, there has been a disturbing rising trend whereby more and more money is being spent on the prison system as compared to education spending. The US also has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners being found in the country.
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., which filed the biggest bankruptcy in US history in September 2008, could now have enough support from its creditors to implement its latest payout plan that would finally allow the company to lift itself out of the doldrums of bankruptcy, said a top Lehman executive on Wednesday.
When the new Affordable Care Act (ACA) came into effect in the US in 2010, many Americans were hopeful that it would help to bring down the cost of health insurance. However, the opposite has happened instead. Rising cost of health insurance meant that healthcare costs also grew for America.
How did this happen and what is being done to reverse the situation?
Swiss Bank UBS AG has reported a better-than-expected third quarter net profit of 1.02 billion Swiss francs (US$1.16 billion) in their quarterly earnings statement on Tuesday, despite taking a 1.849 billion franc loss last month due to a rogue trading scandal.
Motor sales may have been negatively affected by high gas prices and the sluggish economy, but the sale of scooters has been climbing steadily in the United States, up 29 percent in the first half of this year.
Scooters typically make up a small percentage of vehicle sales in the United States. But with the current state of the economy and high oil prices, it is not surprising that Americans are substituting their cars with the cheaper alternative – scooters.
According to Chinese state media, the amount of Chinese trade with its isolated North Korean neighbor has more than doubled in the first seven months of this year compared with the same period in 2010.
While various international sanctions have reduced North Korea’s foreign investment to a dribble, China has doubled its trade volume with the impoverished country.
Groupon has filed a lawsuit against two of its former sales managers for passing on confidential trade secrets to Google, after they left the daily deals company to join Google’s very own competing daily deals site, Google Offers, showed an Illinois court filing on October 21.
The case, named Brian Hanna and Michael Nolan as defendants, both of whom left the company just last month in order to join up with Google’s new online offering.
Two former Chinese state officials have been sent to jail by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, China’s top prosecuting authority, after it was discovered that they had divulged classified economic data to securities brokerages in the highest profile crackdown on selective disclosure linked to insider trading in China.
Whistleblowing website Wikileaks will have to shut down by the end of year unless a “financial blockade” – imposed on the site by US financial services companies such as Mastercard, Visa and Paypal – can be lifted, thus allowing for donations to stream into the site.
