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These days Donald Trump and Mike Bloomberg can best be described as mortal enemies.

Bloomberg and Trump, both billionaires from New York, for years kept a cordial and even friendly relationship as they repeatedly ran into each other at charity events, parties and even one of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s weddings.

Trump has even praised Bloomberg’s past positions on gun control on Fox News’s Fox & Friends.

After three years in office, President Barack Obama has enough of a record to judge against the economic performances of other recent presidents. The rankings can help you cast a more informed vote in November

In “The President as Economist: Scoring Economic Performance From Harry Truman to Barack Obama,” I compare the 12 presidents since World War II using 17 economic indicators, including growth in gross domestic product, rate of unemployment, inflation, population below the poverty line, increase in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, savings and investment rates, exports and trade balances, federal budget growth, and debt and federal taxes as a share of GDP.

The book examines each indicator for each administration, and boils down the many aspects of a president’s economic performance to a single score. The scores are derived using basic statistical methods, including averaging each president’s indicators, then determining standard deviations from the mean. These methods produce a common unit of comparison for indicators that are expressed in different units, such as growth rates and shares of GDP.

President Trump on Sunday took a potshot at Michael Bloomberg over the former New York mayor and presidential candidate’s remarks about a gun-toting Texas churchgoer who killed a would-be mass-shooter.

“Now Mini Mike Bloomberg is critical of Jack Wilson, who saved perhaps hundreds of people in a Church because he was carrying a gu

“Jack quickly killed the shooter, who was beginning a rampage,”

Verizon Communications Inc. wants to attract teens and millennials who are more used to watching videos on their mobile phones than on a TV in a living room. Yahoo! Inc., which is spinning out its main Web business, has been investing heavily in online-video content.

So it’s probably not a coincidence that executives at the largest U.S. wireless carrier were chattier than usual this week when asked the question: Would Verizon be interested in buying Yahoo’s Internet assets?

Chief Executive Officer Lowell McAdam and Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo, using similar language, both said within the past two days that Verizon would look at a Yahoo deal "if it made sense," instead of declining to comment. 

2020 Democrat Michael Bloomberg dismissed the idea that stop and frisk was a discriminatory policing practice. Bloomberg, in his first town hall televised by CNN, was asked by host Anderson Cooper on Wednesday if the policy, whether "intentionally or not," was "a racist policy." "No," the former New York City mayor, 78, said before touting his work in diversifying the police department and how elements of the approach were still kept in place "by all cities."

Under the stop-and-frisk framework, individuals were detained for a short period of time to check if they had illegal weapons or other contraband. The way in which the New York City Police Department administered the policy was ruled unconstitutional by a federal court in 2013, the last year of Bloomberg's 12-year tenure as mayor.

Bloomberg was pressed on a range of issues, including how President Trump and his administration were "not ready" to respond to a epidemic such as coronavirus, his weaker-than-expected debate performances in which the candidates just "talk over each other," and how he supported President Barack Obama despite former Vice President Joe Biden's insistence he did not. The billionaire information services entrepreneur was also pushed on his stance on reparations.

The arrival of commercial Internet communications in the mid-1990s posed a threat to both the phone and cable companies; eventually, the FCC deregulated the entire sector, thinking that competition among various modalities of Internet access --cable, phone, wireless, satellite -- would protect Americans. And in 2002, when the five-year period of deregulation began, there was indeed rough parity in speed and price between the cable companies and telephone companies providing Internet access.

Soon, however, cable companies found a way to upgrade their networks to provide connections perhaps 100 times faster than what was possible over copper wires, and at much lower expense than the phone companies incurred replacing their phone lines. Goodbye, Copper The American copper wire telephone system is, in fact, becoming obsolete. The physical switches used in the network are reaching the end of their useful lives. But now that cable has won the battle for wired Internet service and consumers are moving to mobile phones for voice service, the telephone companies are looking to shed the obligation to maintain their networks at all.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is rapidly losing the global race for high-speed connectivity, as fewer than 8 percent of households have fiber service. And almost 30 percent of the country still isn’t connected to the Internet at all.

During the U.S. economy’s greatest generation — the era of rapid, broadly shared growth that followed World War II — Wall Street was a fairly peripheral part of the picture. When people thought about business leaders, they thought about people running companies that actually made things, not people who got rich through wheeling and dealing.

But that all changed in the 1980s, largely thanks to financial deregulation. Suddenly the big bucks came from buying and selling companies as opposed to running them

And the financial sector itself doubled as a share of the economy, which meant that it was pulling lots of capital and many smart people away from productive activities.

“Bourgeois Dignity” is both the title of a recent book by the economic historian Deirdre N. McCloskey and, she argues, the attitude that accounts for the biggest story in economic history: the explosion of growth that took northern Europeans and eventually the world from living on about $3 a day, give or take a dollar or two (in today’s bu

ing power), to the current global average of $30 -- and much higher in developed nations

That change, she argues, is way too big to be explained by normal economic behavior, however rational, disciplined or efficient

The Democratic presidential candidates jockeyed for position in South Carolina on Wednesday after a contentious debate the night before in Charleston in which they sparred over key policy areas including health-care costs, gun control and foreign affairs in a testy debate — and talked over one another a lot

Seven Democrats took the stage for the 10th Democratic debate: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.); former vice president Joe Biden; former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg; Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.); Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.); investor Tom Steyer; and former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg. Several candidates attacked Sanders for the costs of his health-care proposals, and others squared off with Bloomberg over a range of policy matters, including his massive wealth.

Rep. Clyburn endorses Biden, offering a boost ahead of S.C. primarySanders takes fire in an unruly debate that left no candidate truly enhanced

Before the financial crisis, the top 1% held a collective $15bn in cash. Today they’ve got almost $304bn.

For every Michael Bloomberg there are dozens of Koch brothers and Rebekah Mercers, who have poured tens of millions of dollars into spreading climate denial and blocking decarbonization efforts at the local, state and national level.

it’s worth remembering that the top marginal tax rate during the time hailed as capitalism’s Golden Age floated somewhere north of 90% in the US. After it had already fallen, Ronald Reagan’s administration collapsed it to 50% when he took office, and it would dip to just 28% by the time he left. The many billions that have been lost as a result are resources that have been captured out of democratic control, emboldening a handful of oligarchs to run roughshod over people and planet alike.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government plans to fine social media networks such as Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. if they fail to combat hate speech, as German officials accuse media companies of being too slow to take action.

The pound slid below $1.20 for the first time since October’s flash crash, after reports that U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May will signal plans to quit the European Union’s single market to regain control of Britain’s borders and laws.

“Even if the pound recovers somewhat in London, it seems as though the realities of a hard Brexit are still not fully priced in,”

May’s speech isn’t the only approaching Brexit milestone. The Supreme Court is set to rule this month whether May or Parliament carries the power to invoke the exit, although few see the process being derailed either way.

The New York Police Department, the mayor and the city’s top prosecutors on Monday endorsed a proposal to decriminalize the open possession of small amounts of marijuana, giving an unexpected lift to an effort by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to cut down on the number of people arrested as a result of police stops.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, whose Police Department made about 50,000 arrests last year for low-level marijuana possession, said the governor’s proposal “strikes the right balance” in part because it would still allow the police to arrest people who smoke marijuana in public.

The governor’s announcement was cheered by lawmakers from minority neighborhoods as well as by civil rights groups, who are increasingly looking to Albany and to Washington in an effort to rein in what they see as overly aggressive tactics on the part of the Bloomberg administration.

In 2001, 11,700 New Yorkers reported earning more than $1 million annually, according to summaries of resident tax returns provided by the mayor’s office. A decade later, 20,416 did.

“We’ve been able to do something that none of these other cities can do, and that is attract a lot of the very wealthy from around the country and around the world,” Mr. Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show on Sept. 20. “And they are the ones that pay a lot of the taxes, they’re the ones that spend a lot of money in the stores and restaurants and create a big chunk of our economy.

In 2011, New Yorkers who made more than $10 million annually accounted for nearly one-fifth of the city’s personal income tax revenue, which is second only to property taxes as a revenue source. The city also taxes capital gains like ordinary income instead of at lower rates as the federal government does.

But it can buy you influence – or influencers, to be precise.

This US administration is establishing new norms of behaviour. Anger and cruelty disfigure public discourse and lying is commonplace. Truth is being chased away. But with your help we can continue to put it center stage.

Influencers must be US residents to apply, and are barred from using profanity, nudity or “overtly negative content”

All of this frenetic investment activity might be a cause for optimism if it seemed connected to a healthier economy. But the stock market and asset prices have been inflating and enriching the world’s wealthiest even as most people have faced greater job instability and slow wage growth.

So far the sudden enthusiasm for GameStop’s stock hasn’t done much for the company itself, much less for the employees behind the counters.

As Henwood, the writer in Jacobin, has pointed out, surprisingly little of what happens in the stock market is about raising money for companies to make real-world productive investments. Prior to the pandemic, corporations seemed short of ideas for what to do with their cash and often forked it over to their shareholders (and their stock-option-paid executives) by buying back their own stock

The latest polling data from the company YouGov show Vietnam to lead the list of countries most supportive of their governments’ efforts to combat COVID-19. To be exact, 95% of Vietnamese people think their government is handling the pandemic “very” or “somewhat” well. But this doesn’t mean the Vietnamese people are letting down their guard. Of the 26 countries measured by the YouGov researchers, Vietnam also exhibits the highest level of COVID-19 fear; 89% of the Vietnamese population are “very” or “somewhat” concerned they will contract the disease. This finding is interesting, as one might assume that fear should drop to the extent that citizens believe their government has things under control. Then again, unprecedented events often produce unexpected results.

Other countries that are handling the crisis well, at least in the eyes of its citizens, include India, Australia, Denmark, Norway, Canada, and Finland. Where does the United States stand? Toward the bottom of the pack. According to the most recent YouGov polling data, less than half (49%) of Americans think the government is handling the pandemic “very” or “somewhat” well. This squares with other polling data in the United States. A recent Pew Research poll, for instance, found that 65% of Americans felt that the federal government was too slow to take major steps to address the threat posed by COVID-19.

The three countries where citizens show the weakest support of their governments’ handling of the pandemic are Spain, France, and Japan. In each of these countries, less than 40% of people are supportive of their governments’ handling of the crisis. And then there’s the case of Sweden. Interestingly, the data show a significant increase in Swedish citizens’ support of the way their government has handled the crisis. Currently, 57% of Swedes think their government is handling the pandemic “very” or “somewhat” well compared to 41% a month ago. This may have to do with the fact that more Swedes are buying into the government’s contrarian approach to managing the crisis. Unlike most of the developed world, Sweden decided not to close businesses and schools. A recent article in Bloomberg suggests that COVID-19 infections and fatalities are beginning to plateau in Sweden and the popularity of Sweden’s Prime Minister Stefan Lofven has soared.

Luckily for us, and Congress, Haugen came with not only information, but also solutions. Smart ones, too, according to Tae Kim and Parmy. To sum them up: Order Facebook to stop engagement-based ranking algorithms. Order Facebook to spend more on content moderation. Establish an agency to audit Facebook’s algorithms and features. Mandate regular disclosure for researchers.

Not only does its sheer size make it imperative for regulators to do something about Facebook, but it also makes that job way harder.

Take Step 3, for example: establishing an agency to audit Facebook’s algorithms. Cathy O’Neil makes a living auditing algorithms. Her usual process would be to consider who is affected, find out whether certain stakeholders are being treated unfairly, and suggest ways to eliminate or mitigate that harm. Unfortunately, this approach is too difficult to apply to the algorithms at Facebook. “They’re just too big. The list of potential stakeholders is endless. The audit would never be complete, and would invariably miss something important,”

What makes history so hard to predict — the reason there is no neat “cycle” of history enabling us to prophesy the future — is that most disasters come out of left field.

Unlike hurricanes and auto accidents, to which we can at least attach probabilities, the biggest disasters (pandemics and wars) follow power-law or random distributions. They belong in the realm of uncertainty, or what Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book “The Black Swan,” calls  “Extremistan.”

What’s more, as I argued in my book “Doom,” disasters don’t come in any predictable sequence.