In the summer of 2008, steel giant Nucor decided to raise some cash. It issued new shares of stock and floated some corporate bonds. As financial markets crumbled, the company ignored pleas from some investors and analysts that it buy back shares, which are now selling for about half their peak.

Don’t you think a lot more people need to be aware of this?
Kevin Poulsen at Threat Level has a great item up about the growing menace of “money mules.” The term refers to bank customers who’ve been conned into unwittingly laundering cash that hackers have stolen from business bank accounts. The con and the funny [...]

Cherie Blair is backing The Women’s Leadership Fund to raise the number of women executives.

A fund that aims to invest in companies with a high number of women in senior roles will be launched next week, with backing from Cherie Blair and the former prime ministers of Canada and New Zealand, Kim Campbell and Jenny [...]

A group of rich Germans has launched a petition calling for the government to make wealthy people pay higher taxes. The group say they have more money than they need, and the extra revenue could fund economic and social programmes to aid Germany’s economic recovery.
Germany could raise 100bn euros (£91bn) if the richest people paid [...]

Low-income Americans with no more than a high school education appear more likely to get vaccinated against H1N1 swine flu than people with more money and better schooling, according to a poll released on Friday.   A telephone survey of 3,003 U.S. adults conducted by Thomson Reuters found that 49.8 percent of people with lower education [...]

The worldwide recession has hit a lot of people hard, but it’s not all doom and gloom. Far from it actually, as is the case with property. As the price of real estate has fallen, there are plenty of bargains to be had all around the world! The villa pictured is in Halcyon Hills, Greece.
No [...]

Bring non perishable food or toiletries to ALL DaVinci Institute events
Bare shelves at FISH of Broomfield are startling longtime volunteers.   Donations to the food bank are falling short of what is needed, while the demand keeps rising.  Help us support Broomfield’s FISH Food Bank by bringing non-perishables or toiletries to the Colorado Inventor Showcase on [...]

Last year, procrastinators were rewarded when they finally got around to booking flights for holiday travel. Back then, airlines were not prepared for the sharp falloff in travel and offered last-minute deals to fill up empty planes.  This year? Dilly-dallying, even waiting just a few days, could carry a steep price. Fares, though still lower [...]

Sheri West lost her home in Cleveland last year and had to sleep in her car
The first night after she surrendered her house to foreclosure, Sheri West endured the darkness in her Hyundai sedan. She parked in her old driveway, with her flower-print dresses and hats piled in boxes on the back seat, and three cherished [...]

Finland’s Ministry of Transport and Communications has declared that access to 1MB broadband is a legal right. This is significant as it recognizes that much of what we do in today’s world requires the net, from renewal of government documents like driving licenses to education to access to health services to engagement in the civic [...]

For the first time in more than 35 years, the U.S. military has met all of its annual recruiting goals, as hundreds of thousands of young people have enlisted despite the near-certainty that they will go to war.  The Pentagon, which made the announcement Tuesday, said the economic downturn and rising joblessness, as well as [...]

The US airlines that created the largest, most redonkulous and abusive fees this year lost the most money last quarter. Airlines with low or no fees lost the least.
Accountants have rigged the system. They create a stream to track the ancillary revenue from fees and they look like heroes when they can report they earned [...]

For years, the country’s makeshift network of payday lenders and check cashers has operated with little competition or federal regulation.  But as the financial crisis sparks a new wave of consumer protections, lawmakers and the private sector alike are training their sights on an industry that caters to the most vulnerable of populations: the estimated [...]

Health spending could threaten future living standards
Every generation of Americans should live better than its predecessor. That’s Americans’ core definition of economic “progress.”  But for today’s young, it may be a mirage. Higher health spending, increasing energy prices and stretched governments at all levels may squeeze future disposable incomes — what people have to spend [...]

Pension funds for police officers and other public employees have been battered and face a long recovery
The financial crisis has blown a hole in the rosy forecasts of pension funds that cover teachers, police officers and other government employees, casting into doubt as never before whether these public systems will be able to keep their [...]

Nevada is trying to get ahead of California with slogans such as this.
It is supposed to be the United States, but the recession has turned America into 50 competing parts.  As the economy bites, states across America are resorting to dirty tactics to steal business from their neighbours.  At stake are business start-ups and well [...]

After a six-year building frenzy that transformed this city, casino companies are shifting strategies dramatically toward slower growth, paying down debt and cutting back on spending.  Many casino executives don’t expect to break ground on another major building project in Las Vegas for at least 10 years.
 

China contributed 19.2 percent of the world economic growth in 2007, up from 2.3 percent in 1978, a report by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has said.   It said China tops the world in contribution to the global economic growth.
 

International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn is using the IMF’s annual meeting here to campaign for turning the fund into a kind of global central bank with at least $1 trillion for lending developing nations in a crisis.
 

The swift rally in stock markets this year caught everyone’s attention. But with far less fanfare, a frenzy has been taking place in the market for corporate bonds.  When credit markets practically shut down last year, businesses had to pay huge premiums to raise money from investors, offering returns of 10 to 20 percent to [...]

Colorado Inventor Showcase
Common misconceptions can cause the best ideas to fall flat – The economic downturn has forced us to rethink our lives. For many, this means a time of stepping into the workshop to give shape to ideas that have been waiting for the right opportunity to emerge.

Nearly 1 million homes nationwide are in the process of foreclosure, according to a report Wednesday from the U.S. Department of the Treasury covering banks and loan servicers that make up 64 percent of all outstanding mortgages.  As of June 30, there were 992,554 homes in the process of foreclosure, up 15.3 percent from March [...]

Web surfers in the U.S. are spending about three times as much of their online time on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and blog sites as they did a year ago, according to a new report from The Nielsen Co.
 

 
Job seekers queue up to attend a job fair  in Chicago.
Despite signs that the economy has resumed growing, unemployed Americans now confront a job market that is bleaker than ever in the current recession, and employment prospects are still getting worse.  Job seekers now outnumber openings six to one, the worst ratio since the government [...]

 
Grandparents are stepping up, and the American family may never be the same.  A few years ago, a key microtrend was the Working Retired — aging Americans who were so enjoying work and health that they either wouldn’t retire or were starting second careers altogether. One incidental effect was that grandparents weren’t around to help [...]