The CEO of Starbucks has been forced to quit as stockholders at the coffee giant pushed him out following his failed liberal policy of hiring 10,000 refugees. Howard Schultz believed he could impose a policy [...]
Authored by Michael Pento via PentoPort.com,
Surveys of both consumers and businesses show there is an extreme level of confidence regarding future GDP growth. Consumer confidence is now at its highest level since 2001. Small and medium-sized business owners, the driving force of growth in the economy, appear downright giddy; as the NFIB Small Business Optimism Index recently soared to its highest level since 2004.
From a practical perspective, operating leases are pretty much the same as debt. They reflect a contractual obligation on the part of one counterparty to make defined stream of cash payments to another over a set period and with an implied interest rate embedded in the payment stream. In fact, within a bankruptcy context operating leases are treated exactly the same as debt and rank pari passu with the other general unsecured obligations of a business. That said, accounting rules treat operating leases differently than debt and do not require them to be included as a liability on a compa
Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,
In the early 2000s, I recommended to associates that we were in for a major gold boom. Most thought that this was a ridiculous suggestion and didn’t buy a single ounce. I continued to recommend the purchase of gold regularly over the ensuing years, and the price continued to rise. Only in 2011 did they start to buy, at a time when gold was peaking. We were due for a correction and in late 2011, it arrived.
For months we've been warning about real estate bubbles re-emerging in various markets around the world from Canada to Australia (see "There Are 66,719 Empty Mansions In Vancouver" and "Vancouver Home Sales Crash 40%, As Toronto Home Prices Soar 22%"). And while facts and figures clearly indicate that certain markets are bubbling over courtesy of all the same mistakes that caused the 'great recession' in 2008, nothing helps to confirm the truly obscene nature of a real estate bubble quite like attending a good ole-fashioned, get-rich-quick real estate expo.