Transactions have given rise to a complex data-selling ecosystem. At the heart of it are credit card processing networks, including Visa, American Express, and Mastercard, the latter of which took in $4.1 billion in 2019 for services that include marketing analytics as well as fraud detection.
As a society we have historically been willing to incur costs to save lives. Government forces carmakers to reduce air pollution to help people with asthma, and the price of cars goes up. Laws prevent factories from polluting to save fisheries, and goods cost more. But that kind of tradeoff clearly has limits.
Dozens of central banks have started looking at whether to issue digital currencies. But only a few have run trials and none has gone as far as China, which appears set to become the first country to put a central-bank digital currency (cbdc) into limited use.
It’s the baby boomers who won the generational lottery, and they now appear to want their children and grandchildren to cover their low taxes and rising health care costs.
Just one per cent of Sweden’s GDP circulates as cash. As debates over the need for cash rage along lines of age, wealth and location, the country is looking to create a digital currency.
Nearly 90% of international transactions in 2019 were in U.S. dollars, giving the U.S. extraordinary power over nearly every entity that imports or exports anything anywhere. Here’s how the global economy runs on the U.S. dollar — and why some countries are trying to chip away at its dominance.
One of the ultimate symbols of luxury and affluence is private jet travel. An experienced bizjet pilot breaks down the industry, the costs, who can really justify such an expensive luxury, and why.
Michael Oswald’s film The Spider’s Web reveals how at the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it in a web of offshore islands. Today, up to half of global offshore wealth is hidden in British jurisdictions.
The past four decades have been perhaps labor’s weakest since the Industrial Age. For a half-century, those working for hourly wages have won almost no real gains. The real average hourly wage in 2018 dollars adjusted for inflation was $22.65 in 2018, compared with $20.27 in 1964 — just an 11.7% gain.
Despite the obvious vulnerability of the sector, boards/CEOs of the six largest airlines have spent 96% of their free cash flow on share buybacks, bolstering the share price and compensation of management… who now want a bailout. They should be allowed to fail.
Thomas Piketty’s 753-page book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, published in 2013, sold 2.5 million copies worldwide and helped put inequality on the global agenda. But his latest, the even thicker “Capital and Ideology”, may prove still more influential.
Millennials entered the workforce during the worst downturn since the Great Depression. They are now entering their peak earning years in the midst of an economic cataclysm more severe than the Great Recession. They will be the first generation in modern American history to end up poorer than their parents.
“Universal basic income” was for a long time an obscure term bandied about in economics circles. That’s no longer the case. The idea, usually involving a monthly cash grant to every person with no strings attached, has entered mainstream discourse. Small programs hint at how it might work — or not — on a national scale.
Africa is changing so fast, it is becoming hard to ignore. In the short term, the continent faces many problems, but in the long term, it could rival China’s economic might. By the end of this century, Africa is set to play a much bigger role in world affairs. The Asian growth miracle is likely to slow Africa’s rapid rise could be next.
Every year, about 70 billion dollars that the US could be using for infrastructure, law enforcement, healthcare or education is missing. It’s hidden deep within shell companies and anonymous entities in places like the British Virgin Islands. What exactly is a shell company and how does it work?
Politicians are floating the idea that the economy supersedes the needs of living, breathing human beings; cruise and airline companies are demanding bailouts and full control over the terms; senators are doing crimes in broad daylight; and billionaire corporatists who did the same are asking regular people for money.
Without an address, it’s nearly impossible to get a bank account. And without a bank account, you can’t save money, borrow money or receive a state pension. But large parts of the world’s population still live off the map.
If you have ever traveled somewhere, especially to countries that are either a good deal richer or poorer than your own, you might have noticed that some places are certainly a lot more expensive than others. There seems to be a strong correlation between the average wealth of a country and the cost of goods and services.
In 2015, the boss of a card payments company in Seattle introduced a $70,000 minimum salary for all of his 120 staff – and personally took a pay cut of $1m. Five years later he’s still on the minimum salary, and says the gamble has paid off.
In 2017, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) found that 8.4 million households in the U.S. were without bank accounts. Nearly 53 percent of these households listed “not having enough money” to put into an account as the reason why, while another 30 percent cited not trusting banks.
Five grand for mystery sushi. Seven for plastic cups. And more fuel than the plane could possibly hold. Such are the deceptions stinging the billionaires and mere millionaires of today’s private jet-set class. In an era of ultra-wealth, reports of shady billing related to private-jet travel are on the rise.
Diets don’t work. Studies show that temporary fixes to old habits actually make people gain weight. Essentially, the dieter’s brain is trained to gorge when off the diet and inevitably the weight returns. Putting some skin in the game makes people more likely to accomplish their goal of stopping a bad habit.
Operating in cash costs countries about 0.5% of their GDP every year. But cost isn’t the only incentive to move towards a cashless future. Many countries are going cashless at great speed. What are the advantages of ditching hard cash and what are the dangers?
Most people think negotiating well is just looking the other person in the eye, appearing confident, and asking for tons of money. But being a good negotiator is a lot more subtle than that.
According to Chris Ryan, the author of ‘Civilized to Death: the price of progress’, rich people have the tendency to distance themselves from people because of their wealth differential.
Despite Ontario’s recent minimum wage increase, workers are still struggling to make ends meet. Even for those who have full-time jobs, earning minimum wage means they have to make a lot of difficult choices.
For the millions of former students struggling to make their monthly payments, debt was sold to us as the cost of a better life. A growing movement poses the question: We have the numbers, so what if we just stopped?
First, take an assessment of your income and expenses. This will help you develop a reasonable and realistic budget. Break down your expenses over the past few months. Categorize and separate them into needs and wants. Separating will help you prioritize your finances.
Hong Kong has more ultra-rich people than any other country, yet 1 in 5 people still live in poverty. SBS Dateline’s Marc Fennell asks why the gap between rich and poor is so extreme.
In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry by landlords, hospital administrators, university bursars, and child-care centers. For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or downright terrible.
The 2008 crisis and the government’s response made obvious the extent of economic and political inequality in the United States, and the absolute decline in wealth and well-being for a growing fraction of Americans. Evidence of decline is manifest to those of us living in America in the first decades of the 21st century.
Former Secret Service Agent Jonathan Wackrow explains how the Service keeps counterfeit currency out of circulation. The Secret Service was installed to combat counterfeit money during the Civil War, and the Service still to this day works tirelessly to suppress counterfeits.
More and more rich people are buying art and stashing it in strange places. According to infamous scammers, it’s not even close to legit. In some respects, it mirrors the giant pools of money sloshing around in Manhattan or London real estate—funds that are relatively concentrated in a few hands spending it in a few places.
The rise of hustle culture is often attributed to millennials, but when it comes to grinding in the gig economy these days, Boomers are leading the way. According to Uber, 25 percent of its millions of workers are over 50, with more drivers over 50 than under 30. Meanwhile, Boomer homeowners are the fastest growing demographic for Airbnb.
With its cheap geothermal energy and low crime rate, Iceland has become the world’s leading miner of digital currency. Then the crypto-crooks showed up. The thieves weren’t robbing banks. They were stealing the presses that print digital money.
When the Venetian merchant Marco Polo got to China, he saw many wonders. One of the things that astonished him most, however, was a new invention, implemented by Kublai Khan, a grandson of the great conqueror Genghis. It was paper money, introduced by Kublai in 1260.
A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that when people spend money on time-saving services such as a house cleaner, lawn care or grocery delivery, it can make them feel a little happier. By comparison, money spent on material purchases — aka things — does not boost positive emotions the way we might expect.
The amount of money adults in the US owe due to educations is over $1.3 trillion and jumps up by more than $2,000 every second. The average borrower owes $28,000. Some cash-strapped former students are choosing to leave America behind in order to avoid paying off their giant debts.
