US Financial News

Americans have climbed a historic peak of pain and uncertainty in the past decade, as the economic insecurity of the American families is greater than at any time on record.

One in five Americans, a new report for the Rockefeller Foundation found, has experienced a decline of 25 percent or more in available household income. The typical American experiencing such a plunge will require six to eight years just to climb back to previous levels of income.

Measuring the depth and breadth of the recession, and the havoc it has caused for Americans, has become a sort of cottage industry in academia and the nonprofit research world. But what sets apart this Rockefeller examination and several recent studies for other institutions — for instance, this one — is that by taking the longer view, they reveal that problems are deepening with each passing decade.

“Economic insecurity has increased over the last quarter-century,” states one of the report’s co-authors, Jacob Hacker, a Yale professor. “The leve

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| Tags: Economic Insecurity, Insecurity
Posted July 23, 2010 by Hanna Silver under Financial News

(PRWeb UK / PRWEB) 22 July 2010 — m62 visualcommunications, the global leader in presentation effectiveness, is today urging presenters to use Visual Cognitive Dissonance in their slides.

Example of visualisation on PowerPoint slide Visual Cognitive Dissonance is the technique of presenting with slides that don’t make sense without an explanation. When Visual Cognitive Dissonance is used in PowerPoint design, audience engagement is maximised and audience recall can be more than doubled.

The technique works because the brain automatically seeks a solution when presented with a problem. Instinctively, people feel an urge to solve the puzzle, and this makes the audience listen to the presenter in order to hear the answer.

If slides make sense without the presenter, the audience believe they already understand what the presenter is trying to explain, and thus do not feel the need to listen to the remainder of the presentation. This could lead to the audience disengaging with the content. Not

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| Tags: Presenters, Presenters Engage
Posted July 22, 2010 by Admin under Financial Guru

Casey B. Mulligan is an economics professor at the University of Chicago.

Deflation has returned this summer, but it’s still nothing like what happened in the Great Depression years of 1929-33.

During most of our lifetimes, the prices of things we buy have generally increased over time. We can name some exceptions, but otherwise most items (even houses) carry prices that are higher now than they were 10, 20 or 30 years ago.

This general increase in consumer prices — often called inflation — has become familiar. Employees expect regular pay raises, and employers can normally afford them because they are increasing the prices of the products they sell.

On rare occasions, consumer price trends suddenly change directions.

One occasion was 1929. Consumer prices were pretty constant during the 1920s. The chart below picks up the story in January 1929 with the red line. That l

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| Tags: Deflation, Deflation 1931
Posted July 20, 2010 by Hanna Silver under Financial News

CARD Act benefits targeted at consumer protection

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| Tags: Act, Card Act
Posted July 20, 2010 by John Wane under Financial News

Windsor, Berks (PRWeb UK / PRWEB) 21 July 2010 — Protect your bubble, one of the UK’s leading gadget insurance providers, has launched a new iPhone insurance product that costs less than half the price of iPhone insurance from some networks.*

The new policy includes cover for accidental damage, including water damage, theft and mechanical breakdown once the Apple warranty expires – all for £5.99 a month. Unlike many iPhone insurance products, loss protection is also available for an additional £1 per month.

As well as the core features, Protect your bubble’s iPhone insurance brings a host of other benefits. These include worldwide cover so your iPhone is protected wherever you are in the world, £100 worth of unauthorised call costs if your phone is stolen, quick 48 hour replacement once your claim is agreed and a free data backup service so you can safely store your contacts.

Cover is available for all iPhone models at the same price of £5.99 a month, including Apple’s new iPhone 4 model.

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| Tags: Iphone Insurance, Launched
Posted July 19, 2010 by Admin under Financial Guru

Federal tax revenue on the sales of firearms and ammunition rose 45 percent in the last fiscal year. That is the highest annual increase on record, according to a new report from the Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau.

By comparison, the annual average increase for fiscal years 1993 to 2008 was 6 percent. Here’s a chart millions of dollars of firearms and ammunition excise taxes collected at the federal level over the last decade:

Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau

Federal sin taxes had a good year last year in general. The bureau’s annual report also noted that federal excise taxes on tobacco rose dramatically, mostly  because Congress raised the tax rate on tobacco in February 2009 when it enacted the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act.

Firearm and ammunition tax revenues skyrocketed for a different reason: These went up because people were simply buying more guns and ammunition, apparently because they feared Barack Obama would curb their access to deadly weapons upon taking office.

“Retail sales analysis indicates that gun sales strongly correlate to changes in the political landscape in the United States,” the report says. “Specificall

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| Posted July 17, 2010 by Hanna Silver under Financial News

Pulse Insurance has announced that it is to offer life cover to individuals who are HIV positive. Many life insurance providers are reticent to provide cover to people with diagnosed conditions or viruses, but the insurance provider has announced it is to offer a policy which offers up to 200,000 of accidental death cover and either 10,000 or 25,000 life cover without the need for a medical examination or doctors report.

Furthermore, the life cover policy can be activated within a few days, rather than the several months which may forms of life cover take to put in place. The cover, named Harbour, runs for ten years and is available to all UK citizens, meaning many of the estimated 83,000 people currently living with HIV in the UK will be covered by life plans something not previously available from most insurance providers.

Managing Director of Pulse, Paul Sandilands, commented that individuals with HIV should not be required to conduct rigorous medical examinations in order to be eligible for life insurance, insisting that they should enjoy the same rights as any UK citizen.

| Tags: Hiv, Life Insurance
Posted July 16, 2010 by John Wane under Financial News

If you would like to manage or resolve your credit card debt, there are many options available that you can look at in order to achieve this. The option that you eventually go for will depend mainly on your particular debt situation. Before settling on a technique for managing your credit card debt, it is important that you look at all the alternatives on the table so you can see which one (or a combination of two or more) is best suited for you. Below are some of the major options that you can consider.

Credit Card Balance Transfer

If you have multiple credit cards, a convenient way of resolving your credit card debt is by transferring the balances on all the cards onto one credit card and then working at paying off the consolidated credit card balance. You will need to identify the credit card that has better repayment terms and interest rates than that of any other of your current credit cards. Sometimes, friendly terms on credit cards last for a fixed period of time as part of a promotion and you therefore need to work hard and be disciplined enough to pay off your entire credit card debt within the offer period.

When looking for the credit card to transfer your balances to, you should not only get the one that charges the lowest interest rate, but one that will charge very little or no balance transfer fees.

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| Tags: Card Debt, Credit Card, Credit Card Debt, Options
Posted July 16, 2010 by Admin under Financial Guru