These days Donald Trump and Mike Bloomberg can best be described as mortal enemies.
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'Huge amount of ego': how Bloomberg and Trump ended up fierce rivals | US news | The Gu... - 0 views
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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.
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They ran in different social circles. Where Trump would go to a dinner party hosted by Jeffrey Epstein, Bloomberg would go to editor Tina Brown’s house.
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“I’m sure Bloomberg has no gold toilets at his house,” said Rebecca Katz, a New York-based Democratic strategist. “It’s a different kind of money with less to prove.”
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Bloomberg has seen his national poll numbers rise within the Democratic primary as he’s poured money into advertising for his campaign.
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Trump has criticized Bloomberg as well. In early December, Trump mockingly tweeted that “Mini Mike Bloomberg has instructed his third rate news organization” to investigate “President Trump, only”.
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Trump around that time tweeted: “Little Michael Michael Bloomberg, who never had the guts to run for president, knows nothing about me. His last term as Mayor was a disaster!”
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“I’m for guns, he’s against guns,” Trump said. Though Trump, in the past, had praised Bloomberg’s positions on guns.
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shared by Javier E on 30 Jun 12
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Democratic Presidents Are Better for the Economy - Bloomberg - 1 views
www.bloomberg.com/...re-better-for-the-economy.html
US president performance economic statistics comparative historical
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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
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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.
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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.
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there are six Republicans and six Democrats, so if we take the average for Democratic and Republican presidents we can make a head-to-head party comparison
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The Democratic presidents scored substantially higher than the Republican presidents, with a score of 26.95. Republican presidents scored -26.95.
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Five out of six Democrats reduced the national debt as a percentage of GDP, while four out of six Republicans raised it. The story is similar on budget deficits, with five of the top six performances recorded by Democrats and four of the bottom five recorded by Republicans.
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With respect to GDP growth, three of the top four performers were Democrats and four of the bottom five were Republicans. In reducing the poverty rate, the top three were Democrats and two of the bottom three were Republicans. The Democrats also had a better record on employment.
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Republicans had better records on reducing inflation, achieving four of the top five performances, while Democrats had four of the bottom five showings. Republicans also did well in lowering tax revenue as a percentage of GDP, claiming the top five spots.
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what does this tell us about Obama? When all of the indicators are combined, he ranks ninth out of 12, one position below Reagan but above Bush 41, Carter and Bush 43. Obama is also well below the midpoint that falls between Clinton and Nixon. For Republicans who view Reagan as an economic miracle- maker and Obama as, well, something less than that, it might come as a shock that Obama falls next in line in economic performance.
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Trump hits Bloomberg for critique of gun-toting Texas church hero - 0 views
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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.
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“Now Mini Mike Bloomberg is critical of Jack Wilson, who saved perhaps hundreds of people in a Church because he was carrying a gu
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Keith Thomas Kinnunen, a 43-year-old “transient” with a criminal record, fatally shot two people inside the packed house of worship, but was quickly shot dead in turn by Wilson
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Wilson, 71, was hailed as a hero after neutralizing a shotgun-wielding man who opened fire last month in the middle of services at the West Freeway Church of Christ outside Forth Worth.
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While many praised Wilson — a former FBI agent turned volunteer security guard — for his likely life-saving actions, Bloomberg earlier this month said that heroism should be left to the professionals.
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Bloomberg, the 77-year-old former three-term New York mayor, announced in November that he is self-financing a White House run.
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The Rationale Behind Verizon's Interest in Yahoo's Web Business - Bloomberg Business - 0 views
www.bloomberg.com/...terest-in-yahoo-s-web-business
verizon interest rationale yahoo web business bloomberg economic
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Both Yahoo and Verizon have staked their future on mobile Internet and video growth. On paper, a deal would make sense. New York-based Verizon has already shown a willingness to buy Internet properties with its $4.4 billion acquisition of AOL in June. Yahoo’s Web business, which could fetch a price of $3 billion to $3.5 billion, based on analysts’ estimates, will be spun out as part of Yahoo’s tax-saving move to return the value of its $31 billion stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to shareholders.
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Yahoo’s board has said that it’s not putting the company up for sale, and that the move is the best way to deal with the Alibaba holdings.
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"Yahoo would help check several boxes in what Verizon is looking to build at the moment with a cross-platform ad strategy and new video offerings," said Jan Dawson, an analyst at Jackdaw Research LLC.
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Yahoo’s mail, finance, sports and video sites attract more than 1 billion users, a prized asset that would add to AOL’s 2 million users. That kind of Web traffic, along with exclusive content, is just what Verizon, with more than 105 million wireless subscribers, needs to lure and retain a new smartphone-addicted generation.
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A Yahoo deal would also give Verizon a new source of revenue, through online advertising, especially from Yahoo’s video-ad unit Brightroll. Verizon has introduced an ad-supported mobile-video service called go90 (named for tilting small screens 90 degrees to watch videos). By seeking users and marketers, Verizon is essentially bulking up to compete with the likes of Facebook Inc. and Google, which are starting to move into the Internet space as a way to drive more users to their online properties.
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"Verizon is vying to get a larger share of advertisers’ wallets and adding Yahoo would help strengthen AOL as the No. 3 player," said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group. "Yahoo has a lot of users in a well defined environment. That is very valuable to advertisers."
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Bloomberg denies stop and frisk was a 'racist policy' - 0 views
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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."
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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.
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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.
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“I will support any of the Democrats," he said. "We have these campaign offices all over the country, and we will keep [most of] those open through Nov. 3, so whoever the nominee is can use them." Bloomberg's appearance preceded Saturday's South Carolina primary, but the mayor won't appear on a ballot or caucus card until Super Tuesday on March 3.
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U.S. Internet Users Pay More for Slower Service - Bloomberg - 0 views
www.bloomberg.com/...y-more-for-slower-service.html
internet policy competition regulation telecom access
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Other countries have different goals. The South Korean government announced a plan to install 1 gigabit per second of symmetric fiber data access in every home by 2012. Hong Kong, Japan and the Netherlands are heading in the same direction. Australia plans to get 93 percent of homes and businesses connected to fiber. In the U.K., a 300 Mbps fiber-to-the-home service will be offered on a wholesale basis.
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The first step is to decide what the goal of telecommunications policy should be. Network access providers -- and the FCC -- are stuck on the idea that not all Americans need high-speed Internet access. The FCC’s National Broadband Plan of March 2010 suggested that the minimum appropriate speed for every American household by 2020 should be 4 megabits per second for downloads and 1 Mbps for uploads. These speeds are enough, the FCC said, to reliably send and receive e-mail, download Web pages and use simple video conferencing.
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In a sense, the FCC adopted the cable companies’ business plan as the country’s goal. The commission’s embrace of asymmetric access -- slower upload than download speeds -- also serves the carriers’ interests: Only symmetric connections would allow every American to do business from home rather than use the Internet simply for high-priced entertainmen
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Think of it this way: With a dialup connection, backing up 5 gigabytes of data (now the standard free plan offered by many storage companies) would take 20 days. Over a standard (3G) wireless connection, it would take two and a half days. Over a 4G connection it would be more than seven hours, and over a cable DOCSIS 3.0 connection, an hour and a half. With a gigabit fiber-to-the-home connection, it can be done in less than a minute.
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If the U.S. had a fully fiber-based network, Hollywood blockbusters could be downloaded in 12 seconds, video conferencing would become routine, and every household could see 3D and Super HD images. Americans could be connected instantly to their co-workers, their families, their teachers and their health-care monitors. To make this happen, though, the U.S. needs to move to a utility model, based on the assumption that all Americans require fiber-optic Internet access at reasonable prices. How much would it cost to bring fiber to the homes of all Americans? Corning Inc. (GLW), the American glass manufacturer, and others have estimated that it would take between $50 billion and $90 billion.
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The Internet has taken the place of the telephone as the world’s basic, general-purpose, two-way communication medium. All Americans need high-speed access, just as they need clean water, clean air and electricity. But they have allowed a naive belief in the power and beneficence of the free market to cloud their vision. As things stand, the U.S. has the worst of both worlds: no competition and no regulation.
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Opinion | Warren, Bloomberg and What Really Matters - The New York Times - 0 views
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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.
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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
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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.
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there is no evidence that Wall Street’s mega-expansion made the rest of the economy more efficient. On the contrary, growth in family incomes slowed down as finance rose — although a few people became immensely rich
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the famous Bloomberg Terminal, a proprietary computer system that gives subscribers real-time access to large quantities of financial data. This access is incredibly expensive — a subscription costs around $24,000 a year. But it’s a must-have in the financial industry, because traders with Bloomberg Terminals can react to market events a few minutes faster than those without.It’s an extremely profitable business. But is it good for the economy? No
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Bloomberg has, in effect, made his billions off a financial arms race that costs vast sums but leaves everyone pretty much back where they started.
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Warren had made a name for herself as a crusader against financial industry fraud and excess.It wasn’t just talk. One key piece of the reforms instituted after the 2008 financial crisis, the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was Warren’s brainchild. Furthermore, by all accounts the bureau was wildly successful, saving ordinary families billions, until the Trump administration set about eviscerating it.
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I have no idea how or if Wednesday’s debate will affect the Democratic race. But it may have helped remind Democrats that corruption, fraud and the excesses of Wall Street in particular can be potent political issues — especially against a president who is both personally corrupt and so obviously a friend to fraudsters.
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The Bad History Behind 'You Didn't Build That' - Bloomberg - 0 views
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“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
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That change, she argues, is way too big to be explained by normal economic behavior, however rational, disciplined or efficient
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the usual stories of utility maximization and optimal pricing “can’t explain the rise in the whole world’s (absolute) advantage from $3 to $30 a day, not to speak of $137 a day.”
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McCloskey’s explanation is that people changed the way they thought, wrote and spoke about economic activity. “In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” she writes, “a great shift occurred in what Alexis de Tocqueville called ‘habits of the mind’ -- or more exactly, habits of the lip. People stopped sneering at market innovativeness and other bourgeois virtues.” As attitudes changed, so did behavior, leading to more than two centuries of constant innovation and rising living standards.
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Most of “Bourgeois Dignity” is devoted to knocking down alternative explanations for the sudden and enormous escalation in living standards. In particular, McCloskey draws on the last half-century of economic-history scholarship to debunk what most people outside the field assume was the critical ingredient: savings and wealth accumulation. We might call this explanation “capital-ism.” Whether derived from Karl Marx, Max Weber, Karl Polyani, or, in a more-recent incarnation, Fernand Braudel, she argues, the emphasis on capital simply gets the facts wrong. It is empirically false.
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savings rate of at least 12 percent, compared with no more than 10 percent to 20 percent in modern industrial economies. And, contrary to Weber’s story about a new Protestant Ethic, savings rates were roughly the same in Catholic and Protestant countries or, for that matter, in China.
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Besides, as economic historians discovered in the 1960s, the economic takeoff didn’t actually require large amounts of capital. Early cotton mills, for instance, were relatively cheap to set up. “The source of the industrial investment required was short-term loans from merchants for inventories and longer- term loans from relative
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What was different, she maintains, is how people thought about new ideas. Creative destruction became not only accepted but also encouraged, as did individual enterprise. “What
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ade us rich,” she writes, “was a new rhetoric that was favorable to unbounded innovation, imaginatio
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McCloskey’s book is not only a useful survey of how scholars answer the biggest question in economics: What causes growth? It is also a timely reminder that prosperity depends on more than effort or resources or infrastructure or good laws. Attitudes matter, too. You don’t build a wealthy society by deriding bourgeois enterprise -- or the people who take pride in it.
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Campaign live updates: Democrats jockey for support ahead of S.C. primary - The Washing... - 0 views
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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
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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.
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Rep. Clyburn endorses Biden, offering a boost ahead of S.C. primarySanders takes fire in an unruly debate that left no candidate truly enhanced
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The problem with billionaires fighting climate change is the billionaires | Kate Aronof... - 0 views
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Before the financial crisis, the top 1% held a collective $15bn in cash. Today they’ve got almost $304bn.
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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.
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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.
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Dilemma on Wall Street: Short-Term Gain or Climate Benefit? - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...inancial-industry-climate.html
climate change response environment wall street dilemma prisoners' climate
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team of economists recently analyzed 20 years of peer-reviewed research on the social cost of carbon, an estimate of the damage from climate change. They concluded that the average cost, adjusted for improved methods, is substantially higher than even the U.S. government’s most up-to-date figure.
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That means greenhouse gas emissions, over time, will take a larger toll than regulators are accounting for. As tools for measuring the links between weather patterns and economic output evolve — and the interactions between weather and the economy magnify the costs in unpredictable ways — the damage estimates have only risen.
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It’s the kind of data that one might expect to set off alarm bells across the financial industry, which closely tracks economic developments that might affect portfolios of stocks and loans. But it was hard to detect even a ripple.
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In fact, the news from Wall Street lately has mostly been about retreat from climate goals, rather than recommitment. Banks and asset managers are withdrawing from international climate alliances and chafing at their rules. Regional banks are stepping up lending to fossil fuel producers. Sustainable investment funds have sustained crippling outflows, and many have collapsed.
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In some cases, it’s a classic prisoner’s dilemma: If firms collectively shift to cleaner energy, a cooler climate benefits everyone more in the future
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in the short term, each firm has an individual incentive to cash in on fossil fuels, making the transition much harder to achieve.
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when it comes to avoiding climate damage to their own operations, the financial industry is genuinely struggling to comprehend what a warming future will mean.
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A global compact of financial institutions made commitments worth $130 trillion to try to bring down emissions, confident that governments would create a regulatory and financial infrastructure to make those investments profitable. And in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act passed.
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What about the risk that climate change poses to the financial industry’s own investments, through more powerful hurricanes, heat waves that knock out power grids, wildfires that wipe out towns?
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“If we think about what is going to be the best way to tilt your portfolios in the direction to benefit, it’s really difficult to do,”
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“These will probably be great investments over 20 years, but when we’re judged over one to three years, it’s a little more challenging for us.”
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Some firms cater to institutional clients, like public employee pension funds, that want combating climate change to be part of their investment strategy and are willing to take a short-term hit. But they aren’t a majority
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And over the past couple of years, many banks and asset managers have shrunk from anything with a climate label for fear of losing business from states that frown on such concerns.
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On top of that, the war in Ukraine scrambled the financial case for backing a rapid energy transition. Artificial intelligence and the movement toward greater electrification are adding demand for power, and renewables haven’t kept up
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If you bought some of the largest solar-energy exchange-traded funds in early 2023, you would have lost about 20 percent of your money, while the rest of the stock market soared.
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There is evidence that banks and investors price in some physical risk, but also that much of it still lurks, unheeded.
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“I’m very, very worried about this, because insurance markets are this opaque weak link,” Dr. Sastry said. “There are parallels to some of the complex linkages that happened in 2008, where there is a weak and unregulated market that spills over to the banking system.”
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Regulators worry that failing to understand those ripple effects could not just put a single bank in trouble but even become a contagion that would undermine the financial system.
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But while the European Central Bank has made climate risk a consideration in its policy and oversight, the Federal Reserve has resisted taking a more active role, despite indications that extreme weather is feeding inflation and that high interest rates are slowing the transition to clean energy.
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“The argument has been, ‘Unless we can convincingly show it’s part of our mandate, Congress should deal with it, it’s none of our business,’”
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a much nearer-term uncertainty looms: the outcome of the U.S. election, which could determine whether further action is taken to address climate concerns or existing efforts are rolled back. An aggressive climate strategy might not fare as well during a second Trump administration, so it may seem wise to wait and see how it shakes out.
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big companies are hesitating on climate-sensitive investments as November approaches, but says that “two things are misguided and quite dangerous about that hypothesis.”
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One: States like California are establishing stricter rules for carbon-related financial disclosures and may step it up further if Republicans win
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And two: Europe is phasing in a “carbon border adjustment mechanism,” which will punish polluting companies that want to do business there.
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at the moment, even European financial institutions feel pressure from the United States, which — while providing some of the most generous subsidies so far for renewable-energy investment — has not imposed a price on carbon.
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The global insurance company Allianz has set out a plan to align its investments in a way that would prevent warming above 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, if everyone else did the same. But it’s difficult to steer a portfolio to climate-friendly assets while other funds take on polluting companies and reap short-term profits for impatient clients.
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“This is the main challenge for an asset manager, to really bring the customer along,” said Markus Zimmer, an Allianz economist. Asset managers don’t have sufficient tools on their own to move money out of polluting investments and into clean ones, if they want to stay in business,
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“Of course it helps if the financial industry is somehow ambitious, but you cannot really substitute the lack of actions by policymakers,”
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According to new research, the benefit is greater when decarbonization occurs faster, because the risks of extreme damage mount as time goes on. But without a uniform set of rules, someone is bound to scoop up the immediate profits, disadvantaging those that don’t — and the longer-term outcome is adverse for all.
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Merkel Coalition Seeks to Punish Social Media for Hate Speech - Bloomberg - 0 views
www.bloomberg.com/...ocial-networks-for-hate-speech
germany angela merkel social media free speech hate
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Pound Slides at Much as 1.6% as May Reported to Seek Hard Brexit - Bloomberg - 0 views
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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.
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“Even if the pound recovers somewhat in London, it seems as though the realities of a hard Brexit are still not fully priced in,”
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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.
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Bloomberg Backs Plan to Limit Arrests for Marijuana - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Data Supports Bloomberg on Disparity With Income - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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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.
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“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.
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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.
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“Nearly 18 percent of all city personal income taxes were generated by this very small group of not even 1,200 taxpayers,” Ms. Lowenstein said. “That’s a huge contribution.”
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Some 1,041 taxpayers reported making more than $10 million, and an additional 120 reported income over $50 million.
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According to the city’s own more sophisticated measure, 46 percent of New Yorkers are living below 150 percent of the poverty line, which suggests that while they are not officially poor by the federal standard, they are struggling. Still, the poverty rate in New York is lower than in many other major cities.
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Mike Bloomberg will pay you $150 to say nice things about him on Instagram | US news | ... - 0 views
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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.
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Influencers must be US residents to apply, and are barred from using profanity, nudity or “overtly negative content”
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The Bloomberg campaign is using the social marketing agency Tribe to recruit influencers. A post on Tribe’s platform – which matches influencers with paid opportunities – asks influencers to apply for the gig by explaining “why Mike Bloomberg is the electable candidate who can rise above the fray, work across the aisle so ALL Americans feel heard & respected”.
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. Our journalism is free and open for all, but it's made possible thanks to the support we receive from readers like you across America in all 50 states.
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GameStop (GME): How WallStreetBets and Robinhood Created Bonkers Stock Market - Bloomberg - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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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
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There’s been a lot of cheap money floating around in the past decade, thanks to low interest rates and Federal Reserve policy. Much of that has gone into financial assets, jacking up the wealth of those who own them.
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“Eighty percent of the stock is owned by 20% of the people,” he said. (The reality is actually more extreme than that, with the richest 10% holding 84% of equity wealth, according to economist Edward Wolff.)
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one of many changes wrought by the pandemic is that it’s shown how aggressive government spending to put cash in ordinary Americans’ pockets can do a lot of good. What if there was an economy where households relied less on wealth trickling down from asset owners? That would be something for Wall Street to be nervous about.
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Which Countries Are Handling The COVID-19 Crisis Best? New Public Opinion Data Offer An... - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Global Facebook Outage Shows Fixing It Is Imperative - Bloomberg - 0 views
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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.
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Not only does its sheer size make it imperative for regulators to do something about Facebook, but it also makes that job way harder.
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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,”
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