Welcome to the weekly roundup of great articles, facts and figures. These are the weekly finds that made our eyes pop.
Employers Demand Your Facebook Password
Surely this should be illegal, but for now it isn't. Potential employers, during an interview, are demanding applicants private passwords to personal online accounts.
When Justin Bassett interviewed for a new job, he expected the usual questions about experience and references. So he was astonished when the interviewer asked for something else: his Facebook user name and password.
Bassett, a New York City statistician, had just finished answering a few character questions when the interviewer turned to her computer to search for his Facebook page. But she couldn't see his private profile. She turned back and asked him to hand over his log-in information.
How much are you paying to fuel Wall Street oil speculators? A new, very timely St. Louis Federal Reserve research paper, Speculation in the Oil Market finds 15% of oil price increases are due to speculation and is the second most powerful mover of prices beyond actual physical demand. Demand itself accounts for 40% of the total oil price increase.
Multifactor productivity for the private business sector excluding farms had the largest increase in the history of record keeping for 2010. So states the BLS in their report.
While inane campaign rhetoric lulls you to sleep, forcing you to watch reruns of shipping wars until your brain melts and flows into that puddle of lost dreams and promises, Congress has been up to some things.
Remember those outrages du jour, such as using Stimulus funds to hire foreign guest workers? Remember your hard earned taxpayer dollars being used to bring in Chinese foreign workers and Chinese steel to build the Oakland Bay Bridge in California?
So says Roosevelt Institute fellow Matt Stoller in the below interview. Stoller is talking about the 50 state mortgage fraud settlement and frankly he's right. It's beyond belief the government has literally shoved under the rug banks improperly seizing and foreclosing on properties owned by Americans.
The U.S. will file a complaint at the World Trade Organization today over Chinese limits on exports of rare earths used in high-tech products, deepening a trade dispute between the world’s two largest economies.
President Barack Obama will personally announce the action to join Japan and the European Union in requesting consultations with China at the Geneva-based trade arbiter over rare-earths shipments.
This quote describes the new corporate culture exposed by ex-Goldman Sachs employee Greg Smith. In a scathing commentary, Smith says Goldman Sachs preys off of their clients and the company is all about making money...for Goldman Sachs and themselves, that is. Internally they call clients Muppets, institutions and people to milk money from.
It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.
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