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in title, tags, annotations or urlHow the Mormons Make Money - Businessweek - 0 views
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“The Mormon Church is very different than any other church. … Traditional Christianity and Judaism make a clear distinction between what is spiritual and what is temporal, while Mormon theology specifically denies that there is such a distinction.”
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To Latter-day Saints, opening megamalls, operating a billion-dollar media and insurance conglomerate, and running a Polynesian theme park are all part of doing God’s work. Says Quinn: “In the Mormon [leadership’s] worldview, it’s as spiritual to give alms to the poor, as the old phrase goes in the Biblical sense, as it is to make a million dollars.”
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“There are religious groups that own radio stations, but they don’t also own cattle ranches. There are religious groups that own retreats, but they don’t also own insurance companies,” says Ryan Cragun, a sociology professor at the University of Tampa and co-author of the recently published book Could I Vote for a Mormon for President? “Given their array of corporate interests, it would probably make more sense to refer to them as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Holdings Inc.”
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BBC News - Ukraine protests: Opposition holds first new year rally - 0 views
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Several thousand people have rallied in the centre of the Ukrainian capital in the first anti-government protest of the new year.
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The protesters oppose President Viktor Yanukovych's policy of strengthening ties with Russia rather than the EU.
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The protests, and occupation of the square by activists, were sparked by Mr Yanukovych's decision to abandon plans to sign an association agreement with the European Union.
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Silicon Valley's Youth Problem - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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: Why do these smart, quantitatively trained engineers, who could help cure cancer or fix healthcare.gov, want to work for a sexting app?
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But things are changing. Technology as service is being interpreted in more and more creative ways: Companies like Uber and Airbnb, while properly classified as interfaces and marketplaces, are really providing the most elevated service of all — that of doing it ourselves.
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All varieties of ambition head to Silicon Valley now — it can no longer be designated the sole domain of nerds like Steve Wozniak or even successor nerds like Mark Zuckerberg. The face of web tech today could easily be a designer, like Brian Chesky at Airbnb, or a magazine editor, like Jeff Koyen at Assignmint. Such entrepreneurs come from backgrounds outside computer science and are likely to think of their companies in terms more grandiose than their technical components
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In Defense of Anonymous Political Giving - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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In partisan terms, the growth of secrecy in campaign finance has been driven by the political right, as shown in the graphic at Figure 2. Of the $310.8 million in total political spending by nondisclosing groups in 2011-12, $265.2 million, or 85.5 percent, was spent by conservative, pro-Republican organizations (red in the pie chart), and $10.9 million, or 11.2 percent, was spent by liberal, pro-Democratic organizations (blue in the chart).
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do you have a principled answer to the argument that efforts to influence the political and policy-making process should be as transparent and open as possible because voters deserve to know who is trying to persuade them to take stands on issues of major public importance? More simply: Is transparency an essential ingredient of democracy? What overrides transparency?
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“The rationale behind donor anonymity, which is a form of First Amendment speech, is to protect against the threat of retaliation when someone or some group takes a stand, espouses their point of view or articulates a position on issues that may (or may not) be popular with the general public or the political party in majority power. There are many precedents to this: the Federalist Papers were published under pseudonyms and financed anonymously, out of fear of retribution.”
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In $13 Billion Settlement, JPMorgan May Have Gotten a Good Deal - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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One way to determine whether JPMorgan has gotten off lightly is to calculate the settlement payments as a percentage of the subprime and Alt-A mortgages that the bank sold. From 2004 through 2007, JPMorgan, along with Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns, sold around $1 trillion of mortgages, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, an industry publication. So far, JPMorgan has paid or set aside about $25 billion to meet claims that the loans should not have been sold. In other words, that sum is 2.5 percent of the total, though that figure could increase as the bank strikes other settlements.
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Since the crisis, many attempts have been made to assess how many of the subprime and Alt-A mortgages inside the bonds were of too low a standard. The results are staggering.
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Occupancy was a focus of one of the lawsuits that was wrapped into the government settlement. The suit, brought by Federal Housing Finance Agency, alleged that, in one bond deal, 15 percent of the loans were for a second home, five times the level stated in the deal’s prospectus. Most of those loans probably defaulted, which means the ultimate loss rate on the bond was probably far higher than 2.5 percent.
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The Influence of Fiorina at Lucent, in Hindsight - The New York Times - 0 views
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her celebrated tenure at Lucent has been clouded by what happened two years after she left in 1999. The once-highflying business worth more than $250 billion at its peak nearly collapsed in the face of an accounting scandal and the telecommunications bust. The company laid off 50,000 employees in 2001 alone. Today the company, after merging with Alcatel of France, is worth only about $10 billion.
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Lucent, like some its rivals, artificially burnished its financial performance through vendor financing — lending money to customers so they could buy its products. In 2004, the company settled charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission that accused it of perpetrating a $1.1 billion accounting fraud.
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“It’s unlikely she would have been considered for the HP job once it became clear that Lucent’s success had more to do with loose credit terms and creative accounting than any reinvention of the company as the Second Coming of Cisco,”
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Why the Rich Are So Much Richer by James Surowiecki | The New York Review of Books - 0 views
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Historically, inequality was not something that academic economists, at least in the dominant neoclassical tradition, worried much about. Economics was about production and allocation, and the efficient use of scarce resources. It was about increasing the size of the pie, not figuring out how it should be divided.
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“Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and…the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.”
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Stiglitz argues, what we’re stuck with isn’t really capitalism at all, but rather an “ersatz” version of the system.
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Saudi Arabia: an unlikely ally in the march towards renewable energy | Molly Scott Cato | Comment is free | The Guardian - 0 views
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If the 19th-century epitome of a futile economic transaction was carrying coals to Newcastle, then the 20th century equivalent might have been importing oil to Saudi Arabia. Rarely has a country been so spectacularly well endowed with a resource so fundamental to the functioning of the global economy in a particular era.
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How striking, therefore, to learn that the Saudi oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, is predicting that within just 25 years we could no longer need fossil fuels. This, from a representative of a country that has done more than most to block progress in climate negotiations.
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Al-Naimi believes that solar power will benefit the economy even more than fossil fuels. The evidence for this is that global investment in renewables jumped 16% in 2014, with solar attracting over half the total funding for the first time, driven by a 80% decline in manufacturing costs for solar in the last six years.
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To Cure the Economy - Joseph E. Stiglitz - Project Syndicate - 0 views
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As the economic slump that began in 2007 persists, the question on everyone’s minds is obvious: Why? Unless we have a better understanding of the causes of the crisis, we can’t implement an effective recovery strategy. And, so far, we have neither.
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Shifting income from those who would spend it to those who won’t lowers aggregate demand. By the same token, soaring energy prices shifted purchasing power from the United States and Europe to oil exporters, who, recognizing the volatility of energy prices, rightly saved much of this income.
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America and the world were victims of their own success. Rapid productivity increases in manufacturing had outpaced growth in demand, which meant that manufacturing employment decreased. Labor had to shift to services.
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When She Talks, Banks Shudder - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Companies other than banks get money mostly by selling shares to investors or by reinvesting profits. Banks, by contrast, can rely almost entirely on borrowed funds, including the money they get from depositors.
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Banking is the only industry subject to systematic capital regulation. Borrowing by most companies is effectively regulated by the caution of lenders. But the largest lenders to banks are depositors, who generally have no reason to be cautious because federal deposit insurance guarantees repayment of up to $250,000 even if the bank fails. This means the government, which takes the risk, must also impose the discipline.
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Her solution is to make banks behave more like other companies by forcing them to reduce sharply their reliance on borrowed money. That would likely make the banking industry more stodgy and less profitable — reducing the economic risks, the executive bonuses and, for shareholders, both the risks and the profits.
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In BNP Paribas Case, an Example of How Mighty the Dollar Is - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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f you are a bank in Paris or Jakarta or São Paulo, you can’t really serve your clients unless you are able to connect them to the global market for dollars. And you can’t do that unless you are in good standing with United States regulators. And you will very much not be in good standing with them if there is evidence you facilitated financing of terrorism or governments that the United States considers global threats.
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That’s one of the important reasons that United States-led economic sanctions against Sudan or Iran carry weight. Those countries cannot easily gain access to the global financial system by going to a bank in a more sympathetic country.
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the potential rivals for this position have problems of their own. The euro is only a couple of years removed from an existential crisis.China is pushing to internationalize the renminbi, and while its currency is being used more for trade within Asia, it has a long way to go to become a truly global currency. (Among other things, China would need to develop a much deeper market for bonds denominated in its currency than now exists, and start allowing the freer transfer of capital into and out of the country.)
French Far Right Gets Helping Hand With Russian Loan - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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France’s far-right National Front party has taken an $11.7 million loan from a Russian bank to help finance various campaigns — money, officials said, party representatives were unable to obtain from any French or European bank
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Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder and retired leader of the party, has also taken a separate $2.5 million loan from a holding company belonging to a former K.G.B. agent
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The money appears to be yet another sign of growing closeness between Europe’s far-right parties and Russia. Ms. Le Pen has been steadfast in her admiration of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, even as France’s and indeed most of Europe’s relations with Russia have frayed over events in Ukraine.
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Claiming Paris Massacre as Its Own, Al Qaeda Seizes Spotlight - 0 views
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Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen formally claimed responsibility on Wednesday for the deadly assault a week ago at the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo that killed 12 people, saying that the target was chosen by the Qaeda leadership and referring to the attackers as “two heroes of Islam.”
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If the claim of direct responsibility holds up, it would make the attacks in France the most deadly strike planned and financed by Al Qaeda on Western soil since the transit bombings in London in 2005 that killed 52 people.
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An English version of the claim, distributed online, showed a chilling image of the Eiffel Tower in Paris seeming to dissolve into a wisp of smoke. The headline reads, “Vengeance for the Prophet: A Message Regarding the Blessed Battle of Paris.”
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Disputed Claims Over Qaeda Role in Paris Attacks - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The younger of the two brothers who killed 12 people in Paris last week most likely used his older brother’s passport in 2011 to travel to Yemen, where he received training and $20,000 from Al Qaeda’s affiliate there, presumably to finance attacks when he returned home to France.
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American counterterrorism officials said on Wednesday they now believe that Chérif Kouachi, the younger brother, was the likely aggressor in the attacks, not Saïd Kouachi, as they first thought
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If the claim of direct responsibility holds up, it would make the attacks in France the deadliest planned and financed by Al Qaeda on Western soil since the transit bombings in London in 2005 that killed 52 people
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Megan McArdle - Authors - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Steve Pearlstein has a piece on bank compensation that points out something that I took on last year: the absurdly high fees that investment banks charge to do deals.
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What we want to know is, why? Unless you know that, any project to put an end to these excess profits will stall out.
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There are standard answers that I find implausible, like "oligopoly". Or rather, saying that they have a cosy anti-competitive club simply restates the question; it doesn't actually answer it. Oligopolies aren't particularly stable--the Big Three persisted for so long arguably only because the UAW kept them from competing on labor costs.
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Donald Trump explains American politics in a single sentence - The Washington Post - 0 views
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On Morning Joe Wednesday morning, Donald Trump explained his — and Bernie Sanders’s — big wins in New Hampshire this way: “We’re being ripped off by everybody. And I guess that’s the thing that Bernie Sanders and myself have in common
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We’re being ripped off, and Trump and Sanders are the only two candidates who are really saying that. They are speaking to people’s sense that our economic and political systems are cheating them, that they are being failed because the underlying rules of those systems have themselves been rigged.
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In one sentence, Sanders blamed flat wages and soaring inequality on an economy whose rules have been written to benefit a tiny elite at the expense of everyone else, and tied this directly to a political system whose rules have been written to dis-empower the American people from doing anything about it.
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ISIS: Leaked documents reveal fighters' preferences - CNN.com - 0 views
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What's your first and last name? Your education and work experience? Do you have recommendations? And are you willing to be a suicide attacker or would you prefer to be a fighter for ISIS?
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Germany's interior minister said he believes data in the documents -- described by European media as the names and personal data of tens of thousands of possible ISIS recruits -- could allow authorities to prosecute people who joined ISIS and then returned to their home countries.
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If they did not hear from him, they would know that he is dead."
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Eating Less Meat Is World's Best Chance For Timely Climate Change, Say Experts - Forbes - 0 views
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he world’s best chance for achieving timely, disaster-averting climate change may actually be a vegetarian diet eating less meat,
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simply suggest diets containing less meat.)
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A widely cited 2006 report estimated that 18% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions were attributable to cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, pigs and poultry. However, analysis performed by Goodland, with co-writer Jeff Anhang, an environmental specialist at the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation, found that figure to now more accurately be 51%.
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