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USA! USA!
Jin Lee/Bloomberg via Getty
By Seema Mody, reporter Doing business in the U.S. almost exclusively, rather than expanding abroad, is looking like a pretty good recipe for success.According to Thomson Reuters, 150 of the 500 companies in the S&P 500 make 95 to 100 percent of their revenue inside U.S. borders.Thomson Reuters analyst John Kozey calls them the "Sold in the USA" portfolio, and these basket of stocks on average are outperforming the S&P 500 benchmark on a 12-month and 24-month basis.
California Sues JPMorgan
Over credit card lawsuits.
Watch out Eric Schneiderman, there’s another rising Democratic attorney general going after banks. In a suit filed by California Attorney General Kamala Harris, the state is accusing JPMorgan Chase of having “committed debt collection abuses against tens of thousands of California consumers.” The thousands of lawsuits filed by JPMorgan allegedly used questionable documents and incomplete court records, creating a deluge of legal abuses for consumers and the state.
Why Can’t the Kochs Buy the LAT?
Reed Saxon/AP
The ‘end of journalism as we know it?’ The media’s hysteria over the bogeyman billionaires’ interest in buying Tribune Co. reflects our heretical politics.
When billionaire investment guru Warren Buffett forked over $142 million to purchase 63 newspapers last year, most other newspapers didn’t take much notice. Buffett’s decision seemed backward-looking but deserving of praise: to us journalists, anyone rich and reckless enough to assume the cost of operating a newspaper in this grim media environment was worth celebrating.But absent from the scattered coverage of the Buffett mega-purchase was the usual finger-wagging and moralizing about media concentration and the potential dangers of a politically engaged owner interfering in his newspapers’ political coverage.
Is Cablevision Ready for Glenn Beck?
David Karp/AP
Just days after Glenn Beck picked up a deal with the cable provider, he’s back to the headline-grabbing antics that ended his days at Fox News. Does Cablevision know what it’s getting into?
Say this for Glenn Beck: the guy really knows how to make an entrance.Just as it was announced last week that the cable distributor Cablevision has picked up the conservative shock-jock’s fledgling Internet channel, The Blaze, Beck has again found himself fending off a series of controversies of his own making.First, there was his keynote address at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in which he appeared to compare Mike Bloomberg to Hitler—only to later say that in fact, he was only comparing the New York City mayor to Lenin.
Elizabeth Warren Wants the Fed to Get Into the Student Loan Business
Should students get the same loan rates as banks at the discount window?
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has just introduced a new bill, the Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act, to offer student loans at the same rates that the Federal Reserve charges big banks through its discount window lending program. At the moment, that rate is about 0.75%. The rates on federally guaranteed student loans, meanwhile, is set to double to 6.8% this summer."Some may say we can't afford this proposal," said Senator Warren as she introduced the bill.
American Airlines Invite for Those Who Make the 'Social' Grade
Brad Barket/Getty
By Darren Booth Updating your Facebook status and garnering followers on Twitter could get you VIP treatment at the airport from American Airlines.American has partnered with Klout, a website and mobile app that tracks an individual's power in social media, to provide a complimentary free day pass to any of the airline's Admirals Club airport lounges to people with a Klout score of 55 or above.What's a Klout score, you ask? It's a numerical value of 1 to 100 derived from a proprietary algorithm that measures the breadth and strength of a person's online social influence.
Our Swiftly Melting Deficit
David Duprey/AP
Just when everyone wrote us off as the next Greece, we started shrinking our deficit, then shrunk it some more. Daniel Gross on what’s behind the numbers.
A few funny things happened this spring as the U.S. hurtled along the road to fiscal degeneracy. The annual deficit shrunk by nearly a third, the size of the debt owned by investors began to shrink, and the government borrowed money for free.Yes, the Golden Age of Deficit Reduction has begun.The official April Treasury Monthly Statement comes out on Friday. But the Congressional Budget Office’s monthly review for April, released earlier this week, bears good news.
International Cyberthieves Steal $45M
Gene J. Puskar/AP
In just a matter of hours.
You really can find anything on the Internet these days. A group of cyberthieves pulled off two precision operations in February and made off with more than $45 million from thousands of ATMs in just a matter of hours, according to an indictment that was unsealed by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn on Thursday. The thieves, who were located in over a dozen countries, pulled off the heist with “surgical precision,” according to The New York Times, and made 36,000 transactions in just 10 hours. The organization’s suspected ringleader, a 23-year-old named Alberto Lajud-Peña, was found dead on April 27 in the Dominican Republic. Seven other people, all American citizens, have been charged with conspiracy to commit “access device fraud.”
Tesla’s Surprising Success
Paul Sakuma/AP
After a decade of losses, the controversial maker of expensive electric cars actually makes a profit.
For years, the rap on electric cars has been that they are too expensive and it’s too hard to make money on them. And the evidence certainly seems to bear it out. General Motors says it loses money on every unit of the Volt, which is really a plug-in hybrid not a full-on electric car, and Nissan is has been cagey over whether it is making money on the small number of all-electric Leafs it produces and sells. Neither company specifically breaks out the profit and loss statement of its electric car production.
How the IRS Wrecked Your Pension
Don't blame the fund managers, blame the tax code.
This week, I had a piece in the magazine arguing that retirement is trouble. That's a golden oldie for those of you who've been reading a while; my favorite evergreen topic is haranguing my readers to save 15-20% of their income, or fer goshsakes at least 10%, towards retirement. (I mean it guys. You need to save more.)But this piece had an interesting peg: Republic Services, Inc. is in the middle of an epic battle with the Teamsters International over the pension plans that cover their workers.
Stories We Like
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International Business Times
Nawaz Sharif, The Lion (Or Tiger?) Of Pakistan
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Rolling Stone
Top 10 Banned Music Videos
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Huffington Post Tech
New Google Maps is Coming and It Looks Awesome
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Ask Men
10 Most Common Fashion Mistakes Guys Make
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International Business Times
HSBC, Europe’s Largest Bank, Will Lay Off 5.5% Of Its Global Workforce
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Huffington Post Politics
'Nightmare' Rocks Tea Party Groups
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International Business Times
‘Best Jobs In The World’ Finalists Announced As Interest In Australia Peaks
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Mental Floss
5 Crazy Examples of Fear in Advertising
Colbert Rips 'Spreadsheet Error' in Austerity Supporting Harvard Study
After a University of Massachusetts student found significant errors in a study beloved by budget cutters world over by Harvard economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, Stephen Colbert does what he does best -- leaves them in the dust.
Writers We Like
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James D. Hamilton and Menzie Chinn
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Mark Thoma – Economist’s View
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Barry Ritholtz – The Big Picture
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Tyler Cowen/Alex Tabarrok – Marginal Revolution
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Greg Mankiw
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Peter Boone, Simon Johnson, and James Kwak
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Brad De Long
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Nouriel Roubini
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Calculated Risk
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Dealbreaker
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Eddy Elfenbein — Crossing Wall Street
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Zero Hedge
Business
Daniel Gross
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Big Fat Green Government
Tree huggers and deficit hawks rejoice: The federal government is buying up to 10,000... More
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Our Swiftly Melting Deficit
Just when everyone wrote us off as the next Greece, we started shrinking our deficit,... More
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American Apparel’s Dov Charney on the Bangladesh Tragedy
Paying a living wage comes at a cost, but it can help the bottom line, says Charney, who... More
Asymmetrical Information
Megan McArdle
Those Generic Drugs May Not Have Been What You Thought They Were
Years of abuses at Ranbaxy raise worries about the FDA's oversight of the generics market



