American Express card members can now receive daily deals, sent via the companys iPhone application and based on purchase history and location. Initially, the deals program will be in pilot mode with offers concentrated in New York and Los Angeles.

Launched Monday afternoon, the “My Offers” feature competes with the likes of Groupon and LivingSocial the largest players in the daily deals market but without the hassle of having to purchase a coupon, and returning it when doesn’t get redeemed.

“In an increasingly crowded marketplace, where consumers are bombarded with daily deals, we saw an opportunity to help our Cardmembers save time as well as money by curating meaningful offers for them,” said Josh Silverman, president of the U.S. consumer s

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A typical sovereign government can secure funds from three “legitimate” places.*What are these sources?

1. Taxes today.
2. Taxes tomorrow. In other words we can borrow money today in order to build our bridge and then use future tax revenues to pay for the debt tomorrow. By the way, if the government is in the business of actually producing valuable “public goods” then you can easily think of this as value enhancing.
3. Printing money. It’s not generally done this way, but in effect the monetary authorities can monetize the borrowing of a sovereign entity (how they do it is beyond the scope of this post). For simplicity, imagine instead that a central bank prints new bank notes from scratch, hands them to the Treasury, and then the Treasury spends them on goods and services. This is j

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On 9 May 2002, as I hit 30, the gift one of my best friends, Justin, gave me was a next stop 40 T-shirt. The following May as he followed suit (hes just under a year younger), I, of course, gifted it back to him. Then last May as I hit 39, I found the same T-shirt sent back to me. Well, in the best possible MoneySaving taste, Ive just packaged it up, put it in a box, added a card and sent it back to him.

In the end, Justin did a clever bit of gift-giving. He bought it, and hes the one who gets to keep it in perpetuity.

The Central Bank has removed its suspension on the trading license of Marketspreads, permitting the spread betting firm to re-open for business.

The Irish Central Bank, which regulates financial firms based in Ireland ordered MarketSpreads to suspend the provision of investment services to new clients and suspend its operations on April 5th following concerns which arised in relation to MarketSpreads 2009 accounts and the adequacy of the companys book capital.

The suspension of MarketSpreads trading license followed the collapse of UK-based WorldSpreads plc, the company that was originally MarketSpreads mother company and from which MarketSpreads split in 2009.

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No conditions of approval offers fax immediately and the money will be deposited into your account within 24 hours. For this, the person must be 18 years and an adult. It should be a permanent job and get paid at least £ 1,000 per month. Read full post…

Word on the Street

• Political uncertainty in Greece brought global markets down today.
• The S&P 500 hit a monthly low.
• Job openings hit a four year high in March.
• Sprint’s (S) CEO took a paycut because of how costly the iPhone deal was to the company.
• Ford (F) is going to add a week of production to some of its North American factories.
• Bank of America (BAC) has begun its home loan modification offers.

Interesting Tidbits

• The VC Industry Is Broken. N

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The board of directors had called his offer “opportunistic,” expressing concern that he was trying to make the deal “at an inadequate price.”

But shareholders approved his offer of $30 per share, and following the acquisition, Icahn will own 69% of the company.

With this new stake in the company, Icahn will be able to replace more than half of the board of directors and sell the company, which he plans to do.

And if he can sell CVR, each shareholder could get up to $7 more per share.

Icahn said the deal will extend until May 18, giving him the possibility of obtaining 90% of the company.

The board of directors was planning a poison-pill provision to prevent the takeover even if shareholders were to agree, but this was waved last month.

In a statement, Carl Icahn said:

“We are pleased with the results of our tender offer and are excited to have CVR join the Icahn Enterprises family.  We look forward to working together with the CVR team.”

The purchase of the shares began on Monday and will extend for two weeks.

CVR refines and markets petroleum and is based in Sugar Land, Texas.

Shares were up 1.26% on Monday to $30.43.

That’s all for now,

Brianna

An easy way of searching for mortgage companies is through internet. Consumers can find much of the needed information of internet with little effort.

Mortgage Lender for Bad Credit Scores

Consumers who are financially distressed shall be helped by mortgage companies to the best of their ability. Those consumers, who want to purchase a home despite their past financial record, can take help from Mortgage Lenders.

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On today’s show, we hear the story of a 16th century German weavers’ guild.

They were savvy political operators, who knew how to push their competitors out of the market. They set up a system of fines, wage ceilings, and public rebukes that would be the envy of a modern cartel.

It’s a tale of economic monopoly and discrimination. Of inequality and conflict. And it’s a story of how businesses can stifle innovation even today.

Our guest is Sheilagh Ogilvie, an economic historian at Cambridge.

In this general category of schadenfreude masquerading as academics is the recent finding that conservatives are increasingly anti-science or have lost trust in science.  But here is the actual interview question:

166. I am going to name some institutions in this country. Some people have complete confidence in the people running these institutions. Suppose these people are at one end of the scale at point number 1. Other people have no confidence at all in teh people running these institutions. Suppose these people are at the other end, at point 7. Where would you place yourself on this scale for: k. Scientific community?

A loss of trust in the scientific community is way, way different than a loss of trust in science.   Confus

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Think I sound a little harsh? Yes, maybe a little.

If you’ve read some of my last posts, you’ve heard about my recent plans to buy a home. In fact, we actually did find the perfect home for us! Everything was going great, even the inspection, until the appraisal was done. Want to know what happened? Well, the home was appraised approximately $30K lower than the offer price.

Some lenders are using Automated Valuation Models (AVMs). These are statistically based computer programs that use real estate information such as comparable sales, property characteristics, tax assessments and price trends to give an estimate of value of a property. This me

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Published today in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the study looked at 2008 data from 14 communities. Autism and related problems are almost five times more common in boys than girls, and the number of children identified with the disorders ranged from one in 210 children in Alabama to one in 47 children in Utah. The largest increases were among Hispanic and black children.

Finding out that your child has autism or some other developmental delay is difficult. See our report on a checklist that can be an early alert to autism spectrum disorders.

First there was the price error – Tesco Direct offering the new iPad online for £49.99. Cue lots of people asking “Ive bought it, does it have to honour it?”, only to be disappointed that the answer was no. 

While other companies like M&S, and famously Zappos, have previously honoured such breaches regardless of the law, Tesco isnt budging. If you were being charitable you can see why not. Web errors do happen (weve had our own), though I must admit I was surprised it didnt mitigate the issue by saying at least “heres 500 Clubcard points to say sorry for the confusion” or something of the ilk.

Yet to compound that own goal this morning one of the MSE Towers team, whod tried to buy one of the iPads for himself and got the rejection email, was sent the following:

Come on Tesco, now youre just rubbing peoples noses in it. This

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This raises a pressing question: would the same be true of student loan forgiveness?

Student loan debt is structured differently from mortgages. Mortgages typically have a strict 30-year repayment period. More importantly, after a few months of not paying your mortgage, your lender may start foreclosure proceedings taking the asset, your home, as collateral.

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Cost of transaction is low:

While you’ll transact in the forex market, the cost of the transaction that will be charged is quite low and easily affordable. This ch Read full post…

A KPMG spokesperson declined to identify the companies interested in WorldSpreads assets, although British newspapers said rival spread-betting firm ETX Capital was interested in WorldSpreads. ETX Capital declined to comment on the situation. KPMG added that there would be no sale of WorldSpreads client list. The spokesperson added there would be no sale of WorldSpreads client list.

China is now the world’s second largest economy and the Chinese have made it clear that they would like to see the Yuan become established as a reserve currency for the settlement of international trade. If this is to happen, then the Chinese will have to allow much freer access to the Yuan.

In what might be the first move towards greater accessibility to the Yuan from foreign countries, China has agreed to let Japan invest $10 billion in its government bonds. China and Japan hold the biggest reserves of foreign exchange and entered into an agreement which permitted direct exchange of their currencies (without the need to convert them to US Dollars first). The idea behind this was to cut business costs and to boost bilateral trade. B

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