Saturday, August 1, 2015

Employment Costs Grow at Slowest Pace Since 1982, But it Might Be a Blip AUGUST 2, 2015 BY LORENZO TANOS

The U.S. employment sector saw its slowest growth in 33 years in the June ending quarter of 2015, but 
statistics from the Labor Department.  This comes amid continued declines in unemployment and mostly solid figures for job creation, and is the smallest increase on record since the Labor Department started tracking the stat in quarter two 1982.  In quarter one, or the March ending quarter of 2015, the index was up by a mere 0.7 percent
Meanwhile, consumer sentiment statistics also went down for the month of July, as the University of Michigan consumer sentiment index dropped from 96.1 in June to 93.1 in July.  This is still 13.8 percent higher than July 2014’s data.  Economists described this metric as being stable, as consumers remain confident that their incomes will rise in the coming two years.

Friday, July 31, 2015

There's a billionaire hedge fund manager in the new Google CFO's Wall Street fanclub

Billionaire hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman, the founder of $US10 billion Omega Advisors, is super bullish on Google and its new CFO.
The 72-year-old investor said in his fund’s second-quarter letter that he snapped up a position in the tech giant in mid-April.
He bought in when Google was trading at $US602 per share. They’re currently trading above $US655, which represents a return of almost 9% in a little over three months.
In mid-April, we initiated a position in GOOGL on the belief that the business was not being fully appreciated by the market. At the time, GOOGL and the S&P 500 were trading at the same 16x P/E multiple. However, GOOGL had superior fundamentals on just about every financial metric versus the S&P — Revenue Growth, EBITDA Margin, Cash Flow and Earnings.
While the stock has moved in our favour since initiating the position, we continue to be excited about the new approach to cost controls that GOOGL is rolling out across their organisation. Cost controls coupled with a healthy core business should lead to margin expansion, revenue re-acceleration and more earnings beats. When we initiated the position we had modelled $US35 in 2016 EPS at 20x for a price target of $US705. Given the new disclosure, solid performance and message from the company, we raised our 2016 EPS estimate post earnings to $US36 and upped our multiple to 22x given the shareholder friendly 

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Court records: 3 UVa graduates sue Rolling Stone, author over retracted campus rape article

Three University of Virginia graduates and members of a fraternity who were portrayed in a debunked acc
ount of a gang rape in a retracted Rolling Stone magazine story filed a lawsuit against the publication and the article's author, court records show.
The three men, George Elias IV, Stephen Hadford and Ross Fowler, filed suit Wednesday in U.S. District Court in New York. They are also suing Wenner Media, publisher of Rolling Stone, which has covered American pop culture and politics since the 1960s. A lawyer for the men said they suffered "vicious and hurtful attacks" because of inaccuracies in the November 2014 article, which was written by journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely.
The article roiled the University of Virginia community, sparking protests at the fraternity house and a wrenching period of soul-searching by the university. Despite its flaws, the Rolling Stone article heightened scrutiny of campus sexual assaults amid a campaign by President Barack Obama. The University of Virginia had already been on the Department of Education's list of 55 colleges under investigation for their handling of sexual assault violations.
The article also prompted the university president to temporarily suspend social events at so-called Greek organizations like the fraternity portrayed in the report. Fraternities — all-male social student groups — later agreed to ban beer kegs, hire security workers and keep at least three fraternity members sober at each event.
Separately, Wenner Media said in a news release that Will Dana, Rolling Stone's managing editor, will be leaving the magazine next month. The release said that after 19 years at Rolling Stone, Dana has "has decided he is ready for a change and a new challenge."
The release did not mention the University of Virginia article or give any other reason for Dana's departure.
In the lawsuit, the three 2013 graduates said the article "created a simple and direct way to match the alleged attackers" from the alleged gang rape to them based on details provided in the story.
For instance, Elias' room at the fraternity house was "the mostly likely scene of the alleged crime" based on the details in the Rolling Stone article.
"Upon release of the article, family friends, acquaintances, co-workers and reporters easily matched (Elias) as one of the alleged attackers and, among other things, interrogated him, humiliated him, and scolded him," the lawsuit said, adding that Hadford and Fowler "suffered similar attacks."
In the lawsuit, their lawyer said each of their identities was listed online by anonymous users when the article first came out and each of their "names will forever be associated with the alleged gang rape."
"These claims had a devastating effect on each of the plaintiffs' reputations," their lawyer, Alan L. Frank, wrote in Wednesday's filing.
The men are suing on three counts, including defamation and negligent infliction of emotional distress, and are asking for at least $75,000 for each count.
Kathryn Brenner, a spokeswoman for Wenner Media, said the magazine declined to comment on the lawsuit. Erdely did not immediately return a request for comment Wednesday. A Rolling Stone representative couldn't immediately be reached late Wednesday for comment on the newspaper's report about Dana leaving the magazine.
The Charlottesville Police Department has said it found no evidence to back the claims of the woman identified in the story only as "Jackie," who said she was raped in 2012 by seven men at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house.
A U.Va. associate dean sued Rolling Stone magazine for more than $7.5 million in May, saying the report cast her as the "chief villain."
A report published by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism earlier this year said Rolling Stone failed at virtually every step of the process, from the reporting by Erdely to an editing process that included high-ranking staffers.
No one at Rolling Stone was fired as a result of the article, titled "A Rape on Campus." Dana posted an apology on the publication's website, and Erdely also apologized in a statement.

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Mother's Day celebrations world-wide

Mother's Day in the United States is an annual holiday celebrated on the second Sunday in May. Mother's Day recognizes mothre, motherhood andmaternal bonds in general, as well as the positive contributions that they make to society. Although many Mother's Day celebrations world-wide have quite different origins and traditions, most have now been influenced by the more recent American tradition established by Anna Jarvis, who campaigned for the holiday. Organized by Jarvis, the first official Mother's Day was celebrated at St Andrew's Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia, which now holds theInternational Mother's Day Shrine.[2] Previous attempts at establishing Mother's Day in the United States sought to promote peace by means of honoring mothers who had lost or were at risk of losing their sons to war.