Posts Tagged job
Median Pay For Top Executives
Posted by Oksana Grebenjuk in Business, Favourites on Июль 8th, 2011
The final figures show that the median pay for top executives at 200 big companies last year was $10.8 million. That works out to a 23 percent gain from 2009. The earlier study had put the median pay at a none-too-shabby $9.6 million, up 12 percent.
Total C.E.O. pay hasn’t quite returned to its heady, prerecession levels — but it certainly seems headed there. Despite the soft economy, weak home prices and persistently high unemployment, some top executives are already making more than they were before the economy soured.
Pay skyrocketed last year because many companies brought back cash bonuses, says Aaron Boyd, head of research at Equilar. Cash bonuses, as opposed to those awarded in stock options, jumped by an astounding 38 percent, the final numbers show.
Granted, many American corporations did well last year. Profits were up substantially. As a result, many companies are sharing the wealth, at least with their executives. “We’re seeing a lot of that reflected in the pay,” Mr. Boyd says.
And at a time of so much tumult in the media business, it might be surprising that some executives in media and communications were among the most richly rewarded last year. Read the rest of this entry »
LinkedIn Surges in First Day of Trading
Posted by Oksana Grebenjuk in Favourites, Fund Markets on Май 19th, 2011
LinkedIn Corp., the largest professional-networking website, more than doubled in the first day of trading after its initial public offering.
The stock surged as much as $47.99 to $92.99 and traded at $81.76 at 10:18 a.m. on the New York Stock Exchange. The Mountain View, California-based company sold 7.84 million shares at $45 each, according to a statement released yesterday. The company had raised the proposed range for the share sale on May 17, to $42 to $45 each from $32 to $35. The sale raised $352.8 million. The ticker symbol is LNKD.
Members of LinkedIn use the site to search for jobs, recruit employees and find industry experts. While users can create personal profiles for free, paid subscriptions were introduced in 2005, giving recruiters more access to candidates and providing professionals ways to communicate with one another. The company gets 70 percent of revenue from business subscriptions, a model that’s similar to Salesforce.com.
“The valuation for LinkedIn is rich,” said Michael Moe, chief investment officer of GSV Capital Management in Woodside, California, in a televised interview yesterday with Bloomberg West. “To earn the valuation, it has to continue to grow very, very fast.” Read the rest of this entry »
10 Reasons You May be Required to File a Tax Return Even if you had Little or No Income
Posted by Oksana Grebenjuk in Budget on Март 11th, 2011
Every tax season I get calls from clients with a “quick question:” Do I need to file a tax return? I only made seven grand (or some other small amount).
We’re dealing with tax law, so I hate to tell you this, but there’s practically no such thing as a quick question or quick answer anymore. It’s easier to untangle fives miles of Christmas tree lights than to answer a quick tax-related question.
Most people are aware that there are income requirements for filing a federal income tax return. Most people also think that if their income falls below those income requirements, they don’t need to file. This is not necessarily so, in fact, in many cases, filing a tax return will get you an unexpected income tax refund. And naturally, in other cases, where filing is required even if below the income thresholds, you will pay the tax man.
Here are the exceptions to the income thresholds:
1.) If you are self-employed with earnings of $400 or more, you are required to file an income tax return. The self-employment tax, which funds your Social Security, kicks in at that level. You especially want to do so if you have write offs that will result in a net operating loss, which can be carried back to get refunds from taxes paid in prior years or carried forward to offset income in future years. Read the rest of this entry »
World’s Most Admired Companies: Apple Is Still No. 1
Posted by Oksana Grebenjuk in Favourites, Trading Markets on Март 10th, 2011
Apple
Top 50 rank: 1
Rank in Computers: 1 (Previous rank: 1)
Why it’s admired
For the fourth straight year, Apple (AAPL) tops Fortune’s Most Admired list. This year, the company’s blistering pace of new product releases has continued to set the bar high for tech companies across the board.
Apple took a stock hit when it released news of iconic CEO Steve Jobs’ ailing health in January, but Jobs assured the market in the company’s earnings report that Apple was still «firing on all cylinders.»
It certainly appears to be. Apple nearly doubled its quarterly profits vs. a year ago. The iPad 2 was introduced in March, marking the second generation of one of Apple’s milestone product successes.
Another huge move by Apple was the announcement this January that the iPhone 4 would be available from Verizon, offering another option to consumers frustrated with dropped calls on AT&T. Read the rest of this entry »
Retailers report solid gains in February
Posted by Oksana Grebenjuk in Trading Markets on Март 4th, 2011
Shoppers braved February’s chill to hand retailers surprisingly strong sales gains, extending the momentum from a strong holiday season and providing evidence of a strengthening economic recovery. Worries are growing, however, that rising gas prices could sap shoppers’ spending in the spring.
Among major retailers reporting February results Thursday, Limited Brands Inc., J.C. Penney Co. and Macy’s Inc. reported gains that beat Wall Street expectations. Luxury retailers including Saks Inc. saw sales surge as the affluent kept spending.
There were only a few stragglers. Target Corp. announced an increase slightly below analysts’ projections. And Gap reported a bigger-than-expected drop. Stronger sales from a diverse group of retailers showed that a broader range of shoppers are benefiting from the economic recovery, says Michael P. Niemira, chief economist at the International Shopping Centers.
The ICSC said that its index of 28 retailers rose 4.2 percent for February compared with the same month last year, well above the trade group’s projections for a 2.5 percent to 3 percent increase. The gain, which builds on a 3.7 percent increase last February, follows a revised 4.7 percent increase in January and the best holiday season since 2006. Read the rest of this entry »
Hard for Fed policy to lower unemployment
Posted by Oksana Grebenjuk in Budget on Ноябрь 29th, 2010
The Federal Reserve might risk higher inflation if it focuses on efforts to bring down unemployment, Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker said. In a speech that hinted at his scepticism of the Fed’s latest efforts to stimulate the economy, Lacker, a vocal inflation hawk, said monetary policy can lower joblessness only temporarily.
«Trying to keep unemployment permanently lower than it otherwise would be … is a recipe for continually accelerated inflation,» he said, pointing to the inflation experience of the 1960s and 1970s as a cautionary tale.
With the jobless rate currently stuck at 9.6 percent and inflation running below the Fed’s implicit target of 2 percent or a bit below, the Federal Reserve this month announced it would buy an additional $600 billion in Treasury securities.
The measure, which comes as official interest rates are already effectively zero, is aimed at lowering borrowing costs and spurring lending, and hopefully to boost hiring in the process. However Lacker, who is not a voter this year on the Fed’s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee, appeared suspicious of the policy. Read the rest of this entry »
Retail stocks have already priced in strong Black Friday
Posted by Oksana Grebenjuk in Fund Markets on Ноябрь 25th, 2010
As “Black Friday” approaches tomorrow, U. S. retailers are expecting a strong holiday season – at least, compared to the dismal performance of the past two years.
Indeed, retail sales rose a surprisingly strong 1.2 percent in October, despite persistently high unemployment, continued foreclosures and an overall fragile economy.
The National Retail Federation (NRF) forecasts that holiday sales for 2010 will increase by 2.3 percent to $447.1 billion, far better than last year’s 0.4 percent uptick and the 3.9 percent sales drop in 2008. In addition, retail sales have climbed in four of the past five months; while same-store sales have risen for fourteen consecutive months.
“This continued momentum is good news for the industry, especially with Black Friday… quickly approaching,” said NRF CEO Matthew Shay.
“While there is no question that consumer demand has improved, there are still questions about consumer confidence tied to high unemployment. We need to see improvement in key economic indicators to sustain any long-term growth.”
Indeed, retail stocks have surged the past few months, far outperforming the broader market, largely in anticipation of a robust Christmas shopping season. Read the rest of this entry »
Two million may lose unemployment benefits at year-end
Posted by Oksana Grebenjuk in Budget on Ноябрь 22nd, 2010
One of the worst aspects of the Great Recession is not only the persistently high rate of unemployment, but the length of joblessness many have fallen into.
According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a Washington D.C.-based think-tank, in the third quarter of 2010, 43 percent of the unemployed had been looking for work for more than six months, and 22.7 percent had been looking for work for more than a year.
Moreover, two million long-term unemployed – those who have been seeking work for six months or longer – will lose their unemployment insurance benefits before the end of this year if Congress fails to act to maintain extended benefits.
“In the three years since the Great Recession began, there have at times been more than six unemployed workers competing for every job opening,” wrote Andrea Orr, and editor at EPI.
“Today, well over a year since the recession officially ended, there remain five unemployed workers for every job opening. That current ratio is well above the peak of 2.8-to-1 reached in the prior recession and speaks to the difficult odds even the most motivated unemployed worker faces in finding a new job today.”
Orr notes that critics of extended unemployment insurance often maintain that giving money to people who cannot find work removes the incentive to look for work. Read the rest of this entry »
It will take 20 years to reduce unemployment
Posted by Oksana Grebenjuk in Budget on Ноябрь 15th, 2010
While this morning’s October jobs report was certainly encouraging, given the vast numbers of Americans who remain unemployed, the pace of job growth is still not sufficient to lower the unemployment rate to pre-recession levels.
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that jobs growth in the private sector climbed by 159,000, a faster pace than in recent months. Overall, nonfarm payroll employment rose by 151,000 in October.
However, Heidi Shierholz, an economist at The Economic Policy Institute, notes that given the backlog of 14.8 million unemployed workers in the U.S., at October’s rate of job growth it would take another 20 years to bring the unemployment rate back down to the 5 percent level of December 2007 (at the onset of the recession).
Shierholz also cited that the workforce dropped by 254,000 in October, pushing the labor force participation rate down to 64.5 percent, well below its prerecession level of 66.0 percent in December 2007.
“The pool of ‘missing workers,’ i.e., workers who dropped out of (or didn’t enter) the labor force during the downturn, remains large,” she said. Read the rest of this entry »
The Fed Forcing Us Into Risk Asset?
Posted by Oksana Grebenjuk in Fund Markets on Ноябрь 10th, 2010
By signalling its intention to purchase another $600bn of longer-term Treasury securities by the end of June 2011, the Fed hopes its injections of cash will lower interest rates, bolster asset prices, increase wealth and encourage households and companies to spend and hire. Moreover, by noting the possibility of doing more if the data disappoint, it is also hoping that markets could price in the institution’s future asset purchases, turbo-charging the direct policy impact before those purchases have even been specified.
For a little more color you can check in with Cullen Roche, aka Pragmatic Capitalism who has been writing about this in a lot of detail. My focus has been to be more concerned with portfolio implications as this is my job, not trying to solve the world’s problems.
However, it is important to be cognizant of what I will call a malignancy in the US stock and bond markets being unleashed by Ben Bernanke and his Federal Reserve Posse. Between all of the commentary on what the Fed is doing and Bernanke’s op-ed in the Washington Post you should realize that policy is now targeting asset prices. If you do some blog reading you will find comments saying that the Fed is making it so that just holding cash is stupid, that by keeping interest rates so low investors are forced into buying risk assets. To the extent this is true it is heinous.
It is heinous for what could be several different bad outcomes, outcomes that could be worse than what is trying to be fixed. While I don’t know if that will be the outcome this is one conclusion to draw from keeping interest rates at 1% for too long seven or eight years ago (although this was only one factor and not the biggest factor). If the rally in US equity prices we have enjoyed for the last few months has nothing but air under it then the consequence could be another painful decline—this would not be unprecedented obviously but could push any non-government induced recovery further down the road if the wealth effect actually does matter. Read the rest of this entry »
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