April 27, 2015
By Rob Nikolewski │ Watchdog.org
This may come as bad news for parents who have spent tens of thousands of dollars sending their kids to expensive universities, but one path for young people getting a good job requires just a two-year degree or, in some cases, no college degree at all.
Continue reading Rise of the ‘silver collar’ workforce: When a four-year degree isn’t the right move
Fred Imbert | @foimbert
Telecom giant Verizon announced Tuesday it will be buying AOL for $50 per share, or about $4.4 billion. (Tweet This)
AOL’s stock was up more than 17 percent after the announcement. Verizon’s stock was down slightly.
AOL co-founder Steve Case tweeted his approval.
The transaction will be completed this summer and will take the form of a tender offer followed by a merger, after which AOL will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Verizon, the announcement said.
“Verizon’s vision is to provide customers with a premium digital experience based on a global multiscreen network platform. This acquisition supports our strategy to provide a cross-screen connection for consumers, creators and advertisers to deliver that premium customer experience,” said Lowell McAdam, Verizon’s chief executive.
Tim Armstrong, AOL’s chairman and CEO, will remain at his position once the deal is finalized.
“Verizon is a leader in mobile and OTT (over-the-top video) connected platforms, and the combination of Verizon and AOL creates a unique and scaled mobile and OTT media platform for creators, consumers and advertisers,” Armstrong said in the announcement.
Hackensack Medical Center has deal to merge with Meridian Health
MAY 12, 2015, 2:24 PM LAST UPDATED: TUESDAY, MAY 12, 2015, 5:07 PM
BY MARY JO LAYTON
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
Hackensack University Medical Center and its parent company have signed a definitive agreement with Meridian Health to merge the two systems to merge, a deal that will create the state’s largest hospital network.
The new organization, to be called Hackensack Meridian Health, will employ more than 23,000 people and have more than $3.4 billion in revenues, eclipsing Barnabas Health, currently the state’s largest health care system.
The deal, which is undergoing regulatory review, will create a system with 11 hospitals and two children’s hospitals from Bergen to Ocean counties and a large network of outpatient services, including surgery centers, rehab facilities and cancer care.
“This will be a game changer in health care,” said Robert C. Garrett, president and CEO of Hackensack University Health Network.
Barney Jopson and Sam Fleming in Washington
The Federal Reserve’s ability to give emergency loans to distressed institutions in a crisis would be restricted under legislation being prepared by lawmakers who want to stop “backdoor bailouts”.
The proposed legislation — a striking challenge to the Fed from a bipartisan pair of senators — will reignite debate over whether the US succeeded in ending banks’ “too big to fail” status with its response to the financial crisis.
The Fed contained panic during the crisis by offering emergency loans to institutions facing liquidity crunches. But, after the meltdown, Congress introduced restrictions to prevent the bailout of single struggling entities, while preserving Fed powers to provide liquidity to groups of firms.
https://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c429818a-f5cf-11e4-bc6d-00144feab7de.html#axzz3ZojMogtP
Tom Anderson | @bytomanderson
The Social Security Administration projects that its trust funds will be depleted by 2033—not an optimistic forecast. But it may be even bleaker than that.
New studies from Harvard and Dartmouth researchers find that the SSA’s actuarial forecasts have been consistently overstating the financial health of the program’s trust funds since 2000.
“These biases are getting bigger and they are substantial,” said Gary King, co-author of the studies and director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. “[Social Security] is going to be insolvent before everyone thinks.”
The Social Security and Medicare Trustees’ 2014 report to Congress last year found trust fund reserves for both its combined retirement and disability programs will grow until 2019. Program costs are projected to exceed income in 2020 and the trust funds will be depleted by 2033 if Congress doesn’t act. Once the trust funds are drained, annual revenues from payroll tax would be projected to cover only three-quarters of scheduled Social Security benefits through 2088.
Researchers examined forecasts published in the annual trustees’ reports from 1978, when the reports began to consistently disclose projected financial indicators, until 2013. Then, they compared the forecasts the agency made on such variables as mortality and labor force participation rates to the actual observed data. Forecasts from trustees reports from 1978 to 2000 were roughly unbiased, researchers found. In that time, the administration made overestimates and underestimates, but the forecast errors appeared to be random in their direction.
By David Boaz
This article appeared in TownHall.com on May 8, 2015.
Today is the 116th anniversary of the birth of F. A. Hayek, one of the greatest scholars of the 20th century.
Back in 2010, as the tea party movement was on the verge of delivering an electoral rebuke to President Obama’s big-government policies, the New York Times derided the movement for reviving “long-dormant ideas [found in] once-obscure texts by dead writers.” They meant Hayek especially. But a more astute journalist might not have regarded Hayek as obscure.
Who was Hayek? He was an economist born and educated in Vienna. After the Nazi conquest of Austria, he became a British citizen and taught there and at the University of Chicago for most of his career. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974. President Ronald Reagan called him one of the two or three people who had most influenced him, and so did some of the dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. President George H. W. Bush awarded him the Medal of Freedom. Margaret Thatcher banged his great book “The Constitution of Liberty” on the table at Conservative Party headquarters and declared “This is what we believe.” Milton Friedman described him as “the most important social thinker of the 20th century.”
“Today is the 116th anniversary of the birth of F. A. Hayek, one of the greatest scholars of the 20th century.”
But respect for Hayek extended far beyond libertarians and conservatives. Lawrence H. Summers, former president of Harvard and a top economic adviser to Presidents Clinton and Obama, called him the author of “the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today” — that markets mostly work without plans or direction. He is the hero of “The Commanding Heights,” the book and PBS series on the battle of economic ideas in the 20th century. His most popular book, “The Road to Serfdom,” has never gone out of print and saw its sales explode during the financial crisis and Wall Street bailouts. John Cassidy wrote in the New Yorker that “on the biggest issue of all, the vitality of capitalism, he was vindicated to such an extent that it is hardly an exaggeration to refer to the 20th century as the Hayek century.”
In much of his work Hayek explored how society can best make use of “the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”
When we see an orderly process, we naturally assume that someone has designed or planned it. Hayek says that we fail to distinguish between two kinds of orders: the “made” or planned order, such as a business firm or other limited organization, and the “grown” or spontaneous order, such as the whole society or market process. It is crucial to make this distinction, however, because the two kinds of orders are very different. Notably, the made order is designed for a specific purpose, while the grown order reflects the different and often competing purposes of many individuals and enterprises.
Hayek’s last book, The Fatal Conceit, published in 1988 when he was approaching ninety, returned to the topic of the spontaneous order, which is “of human action but not of human design.” The fatal conceit of intellectuals, he said, is to think that smart people can design an economy or a society better than the apparently chaotic interactions of millions of people. Such intellectuals fail to realize how much they don’t know or how a market makes use of all the localized knowledge each of us possesses.
The failure to absorb that lesson leads to many of our modern policy problems, from the financial crisis to the inner-city chaos wrought by the war on drugs to the failed attempt to use the U.S. military to “build nations” overseas.
Reagan and Thatcher admired Hayek, but he always insisted that he was a liberal in the classical sense, not a conservative. The last chapter of “The Constitution of Liberty” was titled “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” He pointed out that the conservative “has no political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions. It is the recognition of such principles that permits the coexistence of different sets of values that makes it possible to build a peaceful society with a minimum of force. The acceptance of such principles means that we agree to tolerate much that we dislike.” He wanted to be part of “the party of life, the party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution.” I recall an interview in a French magazine in the 1980s in which he was asked if he was part of the “new right,” and he quipped, “Je suis agnostique et divorcé.” (“I am agnostic and divorced.”)
Hayek was more than just an economist. He also published impressive works on political theory, psychology, and the methodology of the social sciences.
He’s like Marx, only right.
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/happy-birthday-f-hayek
Mother Goose Babes in Toyland
WASHINGTON | BY MICHAEL FLAHERTY AND ANNA YUKHANANOV
(Reuters) – Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen on Wednesday said high equity valuations could pose potential dangers but that stability risks across the U.S. financial system remained in check.
“I would highlight that equity market valuations at this point generally are quite high,” Yellen said. “There are potential dangers there.”
Yellen’s view on the run-up in stocks was an answer to questions from International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde, who joined the Fed chief for the opening session of the “Finance and Society” conference here.
“We’ve also seen the compression of spreads on high-yield debt, which certainly looks like a reach for yield type of behavior,” Yellen said.
https://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/06/us-usa-fed-yellen-idUSKBN0NR1JI20150506
Evaporating liquidity and higher US interest rates will cause huge market swings with potentially catastrophic consequences, Institute of International Finance warns
By Szu Ping Chan
6:41PM BST 04 May 2015
Investors face a “painful” adjustment in a world of evaporating liquidity and higher US interest rates that will trigger huge market swings with potentially catastrophic consequences, the Institute of International Finance has warned.
Timothy Adams, the chief executive of the IIF, which represents the world’s biggest banks, described liquidity as the “top issue” at high level meetings of central bankers, chief executives and other financial institutions.
He warned that the raft of regulation introduced in the wake of the 2008 crisis could potentially cause market gyrations larger than last October’s “flash crash” in US Treasuries.
While Mr Adams supports tougher rules that have made the banks more resilient, he said a complex web of regulatory reform may have left banks less able to respond to the next crisis.
“There’s just less capacity for making markets,” he said. “Officials will say: we expect some volatility and this was part of this broader scheme of regulatory reform. But for the private sector there is this issue of: is the total effect of all of these various regulatory changes likely to produce outcomes larger than each individual regulatory reform and its consequences?
“The cumulative unintended could end up being much larger than the one-off intended – we just don’t know.”
Congratulations to Nicole Eskow, a student at Bergen County Academies, on being named an Intel Science Talent Search finalist. During a recent visit to my office, Nicole explained her cancer research that earned her this prestigious recognition. Keep up the great work!
May 4, 2015
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Representatives Scott Garrett (R-N.J.), Chairman of the House Financial Services Capital Markets and Government Sponsored Enterprises Subcommittee, and Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government Sponsored Enterprises, today introduced H.R. 1982, the Restoring Main Street Investor Protection and Confidence Act of 2015.
H.R. 1982 would reaffirm and clarify key protections for ordinary investors that were put in place when Congress passed and amended the Securities Investor Protection Act (SIPA). In particular, the bill aims to properly shield innocent individual investors who have already been defrauded and financially devastated by Ponzi schemes perpetrated by Bernie Madoff, Allen Stanford, and others from further “clawbacks” by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) Trustee.
“This bill is about creating confidence in our markets and protecting innocent investors—investors with their life savings on the line—from abuse, and malfeasance,” said Garrett. “If Americans lose faith in our securities markets, and the government agencies that give them their seal of approval, it could have a devastating impact on our capital markets and our economy. If enacted, this legislation will bring confidence back to Main Street investors by ensuring fairness for victims, enhancing efficient functioning of U.S. securities markets, and strengthening the oversight and accountability of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC).”
“The last thing a defrauded investor needs is an additional shakedown from the Securities Investor Protection Corporation,” said Maloney. “This important legislation would shield mom and pop investors from these so-called clawbacks, and ensure we go after the criminals, not the victims. It’s a pleasure to work with Representative Garrett on this important legislation.”
Buffett Affirms Junk Food, Citing Lack of Smiles at Whole Foods
by Noah Buhayar ,Sonali Basak
Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is the largest investor in Coca-Cola Co. and owns See’s Candies, affirmed his confidence in the market for sugary treats, even as the health costs of sweets become better known.
Buffett, 84, told shareholders at Berkshire’s annual meeting Saturday in Omaha, Nebraska, that happiness is important to longevity and that consumers enjoy Coke products.
“I don’t see smiles on the faces of people at Whole Foods,” he said, citing a grocery chain known for offerings such as almond butter and organic frozen blue curled kale.
Sterling Raskie, AdviceIQ7:32 a.m. EDT May 2, 2015
Any good financial planner will generally tell you to set aside at least three to six months’ living expenses for a rainy day. If you ever need this money, you’ll need it fast, but isn’t there somewhere better to keep it than your mattress? Here are a couple of options.
An emergency fund helps you pay bills such as your mortgage, utilities and groceries in the event you lose your job or become disabled, or to pay for an unexpected car or home repair, to name a few examples. You may need more than six months’ expenses if you lose a hard-to-find job or your household relies on one income.
If you put off this financial necessity, you’re not alone. More than one in four Americans save no money for emergencies, according to a recent Bankrate survey. About one in five people sock away enough to cover less than three months of expenses.
Yet more than a third (34%) of respondents reported a recent unexpected event such as a medical problem or a home-related expense that stung financially, according to Pew Research national survey.
KATHLEEN ELKINS
MAY 1, 2015, 11:15 AM
There’s a BakeBot robot whipping up fresh cookies at MIT; hospitals are now employing medical robots to assist their doctors; and a robot named Baxter can beat any human at the popular logic game Connect Four, among many other tasks.
“Historically what we thought was that robots would do things that were the three D’s: dangerous, dirty, and dull,” explains Ryan Calo, professor at University of Washington School of Law with an expertise in robotics. “Over time, the range of things that robots can do has extended.”
Their abilities will only continue to expand. Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, anticipates that by 2029 robots will have reached human levels of intelligence.
Many people fear a jobless future — and their anxiety is not unwarranted: Gartner, an information technology research and advisory firm, predicts that one-third of jobs will be replaced by software, robots, and smart machines by 2025
BY DAVID KOEPPEL,
The Fiscal Times
April 30, 2015
Millennial workers have had it rough in recent years, coming of age during the Great Recession and experiencing higher levels of unemployment and underemployment than older generations.
A new study finds that Millennials, who will dominate the U.S. labor market for the next 50 years, may face another problem: They’re less prepared for today’s job market than many of their international peers, putting them (and the country) at a distinct disadvantage in an increasingly global economy.
A recent report by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) examined data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIACC), which showed that American millennials are badly lagging behind in numeracy, literacy and problem-solving skills. Experts can only speculate on the reason for the skills gap, but the report warns that the consequences of such relatively low scores could be serious for American competiveness and could have an impact on the U.S. both socially and politically.
The study shows that even our top-performing millennials are not measuring up to their counterparts overseas. Further, the gap between America’s highest- and lowest-performing workers is among the largest. The study suggests that such a disparity can lead to dire consequences, including “mistrust in government, decreased civic engagement, increased rates of incarceration, poor health, obesity, addiction and more”
“We did not do well across the board in all three of the skills that we looked into, particularly in numeracy,” said Madeline Goodman, director of research at the ETS and one of the study’s co-authors, adding that the report presents troubling implications for the future of American competiveness.
Nearly two-thirds of millennials scored below the minimum standard in math. “If these individuals are going to be trained for jobs that have remuneration … then they need to have basic skill level” she said.
Among the 22 participating countries, U.S millennials 18 to 34 years old ranked 21st in numeracy — only Spanish millennials had lower scores. In literacy, half scored below the minimum proficiency level, ahead of only Spain and Italy. For problem solving in technology-rich environments, 56 percent of American millennials met the minimum standards, behind every other nation.
That’s a problem for U.S. employers, more than two-thirds of whom look for communication, problem-solving and quantitative skills in their new hires, according to a report last year by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
Even so, employers expect to hire more new college grads this year than they did last year, according to a NACE report released earlier this month.
One of the central paradoxes of the ETS study is that the millennial generation is our most educated, and the study’s authors make the case that many post-secondary institutions are not adequately providing students with the skills necessary to be successful in the job market. The financial loan burden to pay for this education can also be crippling.
“These results are suggesting that a significant chunk of Americans will have trouble moving up in the labor market and getting out of lower-wage jobs,” says Harry Holzer, professor of public policy at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy.
The skills gap may be having an impact on productivity and growth, and federal educational programs such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have not produced the needed results, Holzer says.
Holzer adds that Americans may need to revaluate the way they obtain these skills, and suggests that post-secondary education should not mean only a bachelor’s or associate’s degree. Upgrading America’s technical education schooling, including certificate programs in such high-demand fields as IT and health tech, may give young people entrée to high demand middle class jobs. He compares American millennials to Germans, where many high school graduates can already solve complex technical problems.
Mark Schneider, vice-president and Institute Fellow at The American Institutes for Research, is also critical of American universities, many of which he believes don’t equip students with the skills they need to function in the workplace or the wider community. He calls most college educations “too long, too expensive” and says the liberal arts skills that they provide are not marketable.
https://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/04/30/How-Millennials-Could-Damage-US-Economy
APRIL 30, 2015, 11:06 PM LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY, APRIL 30, 2015, 11:10 PM
BY JOHN C. ENSSLIN
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
What a difference a digit makes.
Bergen County officials revealed this week that a simple error may result in a $10 million shortfall in the money available to pay for a new public works facility in Paramus.
Everyone agrees that the facility, which is expected to open by September, will cost about $18 million.
When the freeholders approved a $115 million bond issue in 2012 to pay for the facility and the new justice center in Hackensack, the facility’s cost was listed as $18 million, county officials said.
But in April 2014, the board approved a revised bond of $147 million to add a sixth floor to the justice center.
That’s when someone apparently “dropped a 1” in the paperwork and recorded the cost of the Paramus facility as $8 million, County Administrator Dominic Novelli said in an interview.
Those documents were not available on Thursday, county officials said.
https://www.northjersey.com/news/bond-issue-typo-shorts-bergen-county-project-10m-1.1322976
Kaja Whitehouse, USAToday5:19 p.m. EDT April 28, 2015
Despite Michael Corbat’s success since taking over as CEO in 2012, Citigroup shareholders complained bitterly at the company’s annual shareholder meeting Tuesday over the lagging stock price.
“You guys say how great you are, and I think you’re not so great,” said Russell Forenza of Ridgewood, N.J. “You guys always get your money. The shareholders got zero,” said Forenza, who has been a shareholder since 1977. He lost $1.5 million due to the stock’s recent declines, he said in an interview.
Citigroup stock (C), which Tuesday rose 22 cents to $53.02, is below where shareholders think it should be, especially long-term shareholders who saw the stock trade upward of the equivalent of $400 and even $500 for years before plummeting to $15 in 2009.
“I told my husband we should have sold that stock,” said Sylvia Hack in an interview. The New York City resident said she lost roughly $500,000 on Citigroup. After the company’s 1-for-10 reverse stock split in 2011, she saw her stake dwindle from 4,800 shares to 480 shares.
It’s not just long-term shareholders who are concerned, either. Corbat and Citigroup Chairman Michael O’Neill fielded questions Tuesday about why the stock still trades at a discount to its tangible book value, or roughly $58 a share, when other peers have already surpassed this benchmark. Tangible book value is a measure of what shareholders would get if a company were to liquidate.
“We’re doing everything we can to get the stock price back up,” O’Neill told shareholders at the meeting in downtown Manhattan. “We understand that it has been a rough ride for you and the audience. But it’s taking time,” O’Neill said of the stock, which is down 66% over the last decade.
