In the first decade of the millennium, consumers were filled with a sense of optimism and trust in the economy and splurged out (and maxed out).
Without sparing a thought for the “what ifs” and rainy days, young and old consumers alike spent largely outside their means to enrich their lives with everything from clothing and jewellery to consumer electronics, cars, holidays and homes.
President Obama will travel to Arizona on Wednesday to attend a memorial service in Tucson,
a White House official said Monday.
The president will also visit the family of Ms. Giffords and other victims, the official said,
and likely deliver his first expansive public remarks since the shooting rampage,
according to this – quietly placed – item from the New York Times.
Devastating floods in the northeast Australian province of Queensland, inundating an area the size of France and Germany, could cost the economy there more than AUD 6 billion.
Analysts predict the floods, which have affected more than 200,000 people, will cost the economy $6 billion, not including clean-up costs, with mining and agriculture the worst affected
Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, who toured flood-affected regions with Prime Minister Julia Gillard, said the damage bill would be huge.
Facebook, the popular social networking site, has raised $500 million from Goldman Sachs and a Russian investor
in a deal that values the company at $50 billion, according to people involved in the transaction.
The deal makes Facebook now worth more than companies like eBay, Yahoo and Time Warner.
The stake by Goldman Sachs, considered one of Wall Street’s savviest investors, signals the increasing might of Facebook,
which has already been bearing down on giants like Google.
China and India set ambitious new economic targets on Thursday by pledging to nearly double their trade in the next five years to $100 billion annually.
But the two Asian giants appeared to make little progress on tough geopolitical differences over Pakistan, terrorism and their disputed border.
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China, who is visiting India this week for the first time since 2005,
spoke warmly about Indo-Chinese relations and how the two nations could mutually prosper without encroaching upon each other.
The European Commission intends to propose pursuing more bilateral trade agreements and investing in infrastructure in Africa
as a means to increase alternative sources of rare earth metals,
hoping to break China’s dominance of the market for the strategic minerals.
The measures are outlined in a strategy paper for raw materials by the commissioner for industry and entrepreneurship, Antonio Tajani.
The paper states that Europe must step up its efforts to find new sources of the materials,
A top Japanese trading company has announced a deal to reduce reliance on Beijing for high-tech-vital rare earth mineral supplies.
The Tokyo-based firm, Sojitz, said it had signed a $250 million procurement deal with an Australian mining company
and warned that the outlook for stable shipments from the Chinese mainland remained far from certain.
We all have seen it many times before: the marketing team in a corporation accuses the sales team for not following up properly on the leads given to them; whereas the sales team counters by saying marketing is wasting the salespeople’s time by giving them useless random contacts. While the truth probably lies somewhere in between, the constant struggle between marketing and sales creates a drag on any organization that strives to drive greater revenue growth.
It has been predicted for a while, and now it has gone live; the world’s first information war is now upon us.
First came the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against Wikileaks, together with the pressure from government agencies and Senator Joe Lieberman (who now seems more right wing than the Republicans) that forced Wikileaks off Amazon servers and off its registrar, not to mention financial facilities getting closed down.
Ex-soccer star Eric Cantona has inadvertently spawned a global political movement calling for a bank-run revolution after a video interview surfaced on YouTube of him encouraging people to take it upon themselves to “destroy” the banking system.
Cantona, remembered – fondly in many corners – for his rebellious nature (he infamously kung-fu kicked an abusive fan), is credited with inspiring the movement after a forthright interview with regional French newspaper, Presse Océan, in Nantes.
