i.e., Who’s profiting from your news feed addiction?
Facebook isn’t publicly-traded, which means you can’t buy stock in the company on any stock market. But it seems to have found plenty of well-heeled investors without reaching out to the great unwashed masses (i.e., us).
“Experts generally advise entrepreneurs to ask for an amount that their loved ones can afford to never get back, and say the recent recession is in some cases proving this point.
‘The reality is most companies do not succeed,’ says William D. Bygrave, a professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College who co-wrote a 2010 study on the expectations and motivations of informal start-up investors, including family, friends and strangers.
Dr. Bygrave’s findings show that about half of such investors anticipate a positive return on their investment, while the other half expect to lose part or all it. ‘The closer the relationship between an entrepreneur and an investor, the lower the expected return,’ his research concludes.”
If you borrowed money from a family member for a business venture, how likely would you be to pay it back? Would you sign a formal agreement or try to keep the loan “casual?”
(photo credit: Jakob Montrasio)
China’s economy was on fire even as the rest of the world melted down into a financial puddle. But growth like that can’t last forever, and economic officials are starting to hose down the beast before it gets out of hand.
“We’ll never seek economic growth rate and big size at the price of environment. That would result in unsustainable growth featuring industrial overcapacity and intensive resource consumption.” – Premier Wen
If China devotes less of its economy to manufacturing and exporting cheap goods, do you think prices will rise here in the U.S.?
When they say the U.S. unemployment rate is 9%, does that mean that only 9% of all possible American workers are out of a job?
Nope. The official unemployment rate doesn’t count people who have given up looking for a job. It also doesn’t include people considered “not in the labor force,” like students. And it definitely doesn’t tell you much about the millions of people who are working part-time but can’t find full-time work. (They’re called the “underemployed.”)
Contrary to popular belief, the unemployment rate has nothing to do with how many people are applying for or receiving unemployment benefits. The Bureau of Labor Statistics collects data by actually going out and asking people about their employment status.
Click the chart for Matt Berger’s explanation.
How do you fit into this chart?
Screening is the way you evaluate potential investments based on certain criteria. While the criteria is different for different objectives (for example, respect for human rights when looking for socially responsible companies or low price-earning ratios for value stocks), the process of making the list smaller based on specific criteria is the same.
Screening is an integral part of socially-responsible investing (SRI). It refers to the way you evaluate potential investments based on certain social, environmental, and good corporate governance criteria. When you screen companies for social responsibility, you’re checking to make sure that they have respectable employee relations, strong records of community involvement, excellent environmental impact policies and practices, respect for human rights around the world, and safe and useful products.
We found Peter Thomas hanging around at the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards while we were at the New York Stock Exchange this October.
Peter is a really wise and motivational guy. Here he talks about how following your gut (or your passion) is key to living a happy, successful, and prosperous life.
(You can watch the whole GSEA recap video here. To see all of SPEND.GROW.GIVE’s GSEA interviews, click here.)
“The recession that just rocked the U.S. economy happened in part because Americans were borrowing and spending more than they could afford. Now, three years after the downturn began, families are moving faster than many analysts had expected to put their finances in order by paying down debt and boosting their savings.”
Are you saving more? Spending less? Do you think saving is good for the economy?
(photo credit: marctasman)
State governments around the country are facing serious budget deficits, and something needs to be done. But unionized workers in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana are pretty sure that that something shouldn’t include eliminating their right to organize.
“Governor Kasich decided he wants to squash unions and found a creative way to do it, but he has to realize that we’ve fought this battle before and he will not stop us because we will fight to the very end.” – JoAnn Johntony, President of the Ohio Association of Public School Employees
Are unions still necessary? Do you know anyone who is a member of a union?
Is limiting the right to collective bargaining a good long-term solution for these states, or a quick fix?
Union disagreements aren’t limited to factory workers, firefighters, and public school teachers. Check out Amy’s explanation of a potential strike of NFL players here.
(credit: jarapet)
How a marriage of two stock exchanges illustrates the modern revolution in stock trading.
“The exchange business is really a computer business these days.” – Charles Jones, Professor at Columbia Business School, former visiting economist at the NYSE
Did you know that stock exchanges like the NYSE are themselves publicly-traded, for-profit companies?
How much does a name brand influence your decision to buy (or invest)?
Thinking about investing in stocks? Take our Risk Assessment Quiz to see how much equity you can handle.
Even if the graphs are, oh, maybe just a little misleading. Take this one, for example. It appears to say that the reason certain European countries are in worse financial shape than others is because more of their men want to stay at home playing videogames.
See? Italy, Greece, Spain, and Portugal are over there on the right, with more of their menfolk living with the parents. And, conveniently, those same countries rank high on the riskiness (a.k.a. sovereign risk) of their government bonds (a.k.a. sovereign debt).
If he lives with his parents, you might want to think twice. About buying his government’s debt. (via The Economist)
But in case your statistics teacher hasn’t drilled this into your heads yet, correlation is not causation. This is a real-world example of that. Just because you can make a chart with a nice line on it doesn’t necessarily mean that one factor causes the other. Think about this:
In conclusion:
