Money

Richest 1 percent of people own nearly half of all global wealth

The richest 1% of the world’s population are getting wealthier, owning more than 48% of global wealth, according to a report published on Tuesday which warned growing inequality could be a trigger for recession. According to the Credit Suisse global wealth report (pdf), a person needs just $3,650 – including the value of equity in their home – to be among the wealthiest half of world citizens. However, more than $77,000 is required to be a member of the top 10% of global wealth holders, and $798,000 to belong to the top 1%.

Americans face post-foreclosure hell as wages garnished, assets seized

Many thousands of Americans who lost their homes in the housing bust, but have since begun to rebuild their finances, are suddenly facing a new foreclosure nightmare: debt collectors are chasing them down for the money they still owe by freezing their bank accounts, garnishing their wages and seizing their assets. By now, banks have usually sold the houses.

Cyber-criminals could trigger the next global financial crisis by making a major bank ‘disappear’

Cyber-criminals will trigger the next global financial crisis by making a major bank “disappear”, one of the UK’s leading finance chiefs has claimed. Mark Boleat, head of policy for the City of London, said cyber-criminals would go about “destroying bank records and changing the amounts people have in their accounts”, sending shockwaves through the financial system like a “neutron bomb”. People would find that their savings have been wiped out, their records deleted, and they would come up against “denials of service”, stopping them from accessing funds, Mr Boleat told The Sunday Telegraph.

After the VIX ‘super spike,’ is the worst ahead?

Technical strategist Abigail Doolittle is holding tight to her prediction of market doom ahead, asserting that a recent move in Wall Street’s fear gauge is signaling the way. Doolittle, founder of Peak Theories Research, has made headlines lately suggesting a market correction worse than anyone thinks is ahead. The long-term possibility, she has said, is a 60 percent collapse for the S&P 500.

All 2014 Stock Market Gains Have Been Wiped Out

Stocks ended a bloody, turbulent week with a broad-based slump Friday, sending the tech-heavy Nasdaq to its worst weekly losses in 30 months and eviscerating what remained of the Dow Jones industrial average’s 2014 gains. The Dow, down 335 points Thursday in its worst single session performance of the year, fell another 115.15 points to 16,544.

College is ripping you off: Students are cash cows, and schools the predators

An educational publisher wrote to me a few months back; they wanted to reprint an essay of mine that they had seen on the Internet, where it is available for free. The textbook in which they wanted to include it, they said, would be “inexpensively priced,” and authors were therefore being asked to keep their reprint fees to a minimum. The low, low price that students were to pay for this textbook:

Why Americans Are Drowning in Medical Debt

After his recent herniated-disk surgery, Peter Drier was ready for the $56,000 hospital charge, the $4,300 anesthesiologist bill, and the $133,000 fee for orthopedist. All were either in-network under his insurance or had been previously negotiated. But as Elisabeth Rosenthal recently explained in her great New York Times piece, he wasn’t quite prepared for a $117,000 bill from an “assistant surgeon”—an out-of-network doctor that the hospital tacked on at the last minute.

China Makes Bid to Become Part of SDR as New World Currency

The government is very good at making things overly complicated for the purpose of obscuring what’s really going on from the public,” observed hedge fund manager Erik Townsend during our interview in May. He was making a point about the 2008 bailouts. The Federal Reserve played a leading role, applying trillions in paper-clip and rubber-band solutions.

Serious Financial Trouble Is Erupting In Germany And Japan

There are some who believe that the next great financial crash will not begin in the United States. Instead, they are convinced that a financial crisis that begins in Europe or in Japan (or both) will end up spreading across the globe and take down the U.S.

World Bank issues dire warning about Ebola’s economic impact

The economic impact of the Ebola epidemic could reach $32.6 billion by the end of next year if the disease ravaging Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone spreads to neighboring countries in West Africa, the World Bank Group said Wednesday. The World Bank’s assessment said the economic impact of Ebola is already serious in the three countries and could be catastrophic if it becomes a more regional health crisis.

18 Sobering Facts About The Unprecedented Student Loan Debt Crisis In The United States

The student loan debt bubble in America is spiraling out of control, and it is financially crippling an entire generation of young Americans. At this point, the grand total of student loan debt in the United States has reached a staggering 1.2 trillion dollars, and an all-time record high 40 million Americans are currently paying off student loan debts.

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