Investment/Trends

Part-Time Track Jobs For Mainstream Professionals?

"'Ford didn’t offer paternity leave, but it did offer a part-time track so long as an employee’s manager approved it. When baby Dylan arrived, Trombley went to his bosses and told them he wanted to drop down to 70 percent and work from home two days a week. [...] There are now three other men in his department with similar part-time setups; there were none when Trombley started.' Is there a list of large, Fortune 500 employers that offer such a 'part-time track' option? Hopefully the idea of breaking down the traditional 'full-time' job into smaller pieces is gaining momentum in the corporate world." Continue reading →

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Here’s a New Way to Bet on China: Open a Renminbi Bank Account [2011]

"China's economy is booming, and in the West, everyone from President Obama on down is demanding that the Chinese currency be allowed to rise in value. Now, it's possible for small investors in the U.S. to capitalize on this opportunity. The Bank of China's New York Branch announced this week that Americans will now be able to open FDIC-guaranteed accounts in the bank in a way that was never before permitted -- by converting their deposits into the Chinese currency, known officially as the renminbi and colloquially as the yuan. According to the bank's website, account owners can exchange as much as $4,000 worth of renminbi a day, up to a maximum of $20,000 a year." Continue reading →

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A Rich Fantasy Life: Sports Fans Dream of Making a Living Off Games

"Friday is Drew Dinkmeyer's last day of work. Mr. Dinkmeyer, a 31-year-old Florida investment analyst, is leaving the finance industry altogether. He is becoming a full-time fantasy sports player. Daily-fantasy games, which condense full-length seasons into nightly competitions, were responsible for $492 million of the $1.7 billion spent on fantasy sports in 2012. There are more than 30 million fantasy-sports players in the U.S., and almost 25% dabble in daily games, the FSTA found in a report released this month. Up to 100 people earned at least $40,000 in 2012, industry experts estimate. The market is lucrative enough to support some full-time players." Continue reading →

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How You Can Quickly Make It into the World’s 1% Richest

"You might already be there. If not, get a job at McDonald's and work overtime. It only takes $34,000 a year, after taxes, to be among the richest 1% in the world, according to World Bank economist Branko Milanovic in his book The Haves and the Have-Nots. CNN reports on Milanovic data: 'The true global middle class, falls far short of owning a home, having a car in a driveway, saving for retirement and sending their kids to college. In fact, people at the world's true middle -- as defined by median income -- live on just $1,225 a year. (And, yes, Milanovic's numbers are adjusted to account for different costs of living across the globe.)'" Continue reading →

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And how would you like to pay, sir – cash, credit card, or Bitcoin?

"In Iceland, people liked to build their own houses at the time, but they couldn't put the money they were saving to build their homes into the bank, because it disappeared. Somebody had the idea to buy certificates in building materials in advance, and those certificates were denominated in cubic metres of concrete. It became very popular on payday, and our company would issue the certificates. One day the company got a call from the inland revenue asking if we had issued these vouchers. We confirmed it, but asked why they wanted to know. The official said somebody was trying to use the vouchers to pay his taxes." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingAnd how would you like to pay, sir – cash, credit card, or Bitcoin?

Marc Faber: This Will End In Disaster

"With gold and silver plunging, the US dollar strengthening, and oil still above $100 a barrel, today Marc Faber told King World News this will 'end in disaster.' This is part I of a series of written interviews that will be released today on KWN in which Faber discusses the end game, government theft, how investors can protect themselves, gold, silver, bail-ins, central planner actions, global markets, and much more." Continue reading →

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Jim Rogers: Gold Could Fall To $900, India To Blame For Correction

"What caused it to finally go down, and as much as I love India and Indians, they are the largest buyers of gold in the world. And India has a huge balance of trade deficit. The largest drivers are oil and gold. You can't do anything about oil so the Indian politicians are blaming their problems on gold. And they've taken many measures, and more measures are coming to diminish or even eliminate the import of gold. That was the main catalyst or the straw which broke the camel's back which made gold start going down finally, after 12 years of going up. So you have a lot of governments coming together with measures against gold and silver, but especially the Indians." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingJim Rogers: Gold Could Fall To $900, India To Blame For Correction

Gold jewellery stocks hammered in India

"Gold jewellery stocks are in a freefall in India. The curbs imposed by the Indian government and the Reserve Bank of India to curtail domestic gold consumption and imports, has led to a hammering of stock prices. Some leading jewellers shares have dived by 20% to 50% during the past fortnight. Analysts attribute the mayhem to the fact that most gold retailers in India hold huge inventories of gold. Shares of Gitanjali Gems, touted as India’s largest gold and jewellery company, have slumped more than 60% since mid-June with investors preferring to bail out even on July 4." Continue reading →

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Marc Rich, King Of Commodities, Dead At 78

"He sold Soviet oil to apartheid South Africa, despite a UN embargo, and between 1979 and 1994 made profits of around $2 billion there. He sent Soviet and Venezuelan oil to Cuba in exchange for sugar, ignoring America’s ban on trade. He sold on the global market surplus Iranian oil that had flowed to Israel down a secret pipeline, and kept the arrangement going seamlessly despite the Iranian revolution of 1979, another embargo, and the American hostage crisis. In 1983 he fled to Switzerland with his family. Thereafter he became a fugitive, a star of the FBI’s most-wanted list. In 2001 Bill Clinton pardoned him." Continue reading →

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