Cited: Reuters

If Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke gives a reassuring assessment of the recovery and retail earnings that shows an improvement, Wall Street could keep going up after its best week this year. The chairman seems to believe that the retailers hold the keys for stocks.

Investors are eager to hear more on the thinking [...]

Cited: MSNBC

People have begun to ask if there is low profile is an open invitation to crime. Well, if you don’t care about your rights online privacy, than why should Facebook or Google? Honestly, the way some of you people behave online, it’s like you’ve never had a stalker.

How is it you never received two [...]

Cited: BusinessWeek/Reuters

A General Growth Properties Inc. shareholder has filed suit against the company’s directors, saying they should not have rejected Simon Property Group Inc’s buyout offer of $10 billion, Bloomberg News reported on February 13.

It reported the suit was filed on February 19 in Cook County Circuit Court in Chicago by investor James Young and [...]

Cited: Reuters

Continued from “Is US Dollar Doomed? Part 1“

THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

The reserve currency status is conferred upon the United States that so-called “the exorbitant privilege”, as it was called by the former French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing when he was finance minister, the past 60 years.

Because the dollar is in high demand, U.S. borrowing [...]

Cited: Reuters

An optimistic Oracle Corp Chief Executive Larry Ellison said on February 20 he expected Sun Microsystems to be making a profit soon. The unprofitable hardware maker, Sun Microsystems, was purchased last month for $7.5 billion by Oracle Corp.

Hot Stocks

Oracle executives have previously declined to say how long it would take for Sun to [...]

Cited: Associated Press

Austin seems to be the center for tax road tests with the recent deadly plane attack by Joseph Stack. His methods are unthinkable, yet he is accused of ramming his plane into an IRS building in Texas. This is one of a long line of tax protests and Stack’s views are right in [...]

Cited: Associated Press

On February 24, the Senate approves tax breaks for new hires with the help of Republican Scott Brown of Massachusetts and four other Republicans broke ranks to defeat a filibuster. This bill is the first of several job creation measures that the Democrats have promised.

Now companies that hire the unemployed would claim new [...]

Cited: Reuters

Housing Market

The median forecast is for the S&P composite index of 20 metropolitan areas to be unchanged in December from November, non-seasonally adjusted, and down 3.2% from December 2008. This would follow a 0.2% November monthly decline and my .3% annual drop.

The median forecast is for a rise of about 5.3% in January new [...]

Cited: MSNBC

Ron Wolf loves to travel, which is a good thing since he is an airline employee in Omaha, but hates to overpay for hotels. He travels all over the world and has learned that he can bargain his way to better hotel rates.

Consider his recent experience at the Comfort Suites in Grand Cayman. [...]

Cited: Reuters

In an effort to make insurance more affordable and to give government more authority to regulate premium hikes, President Barack Obama has made a last-ditch bid to revive the stalled health care bill.

Obama pushed the proposal at a bipartisan healthcare summit on February 25 in an uphill effort to break an impasse in the [...]