• Twitter Co-Founder’s Next Project Could Be Even Bigger

    By Kevin Chupka | Breakout – Mon, Sep 30, 2013 10:41 AM EDT

    Twitter has revolutionized the way we communicate 140 characters at a time and has catapulted its co-founder, Jack Dorsey, to legendary status.

    The Wall Street Journal named him "innovator of the year" in 2012. Fortune recently ranked him second on their top 40 under 40 list. Reuter's and Popular Science have compared him to Apple's Steve Jobs.

    Related: #TwitterIPO: Let the Frenzy Begin!

    Dorsey's next project, Square, could be even bigger. The rising star now has his sights on commerce; changing the way you and I buy and sell goods.

    Started in 2009, the company allows merchants of all shapes and sizes to accept any form of payment they choose – cash, checks, or credit cards - and replaces the bulky cash register with Apple's (AAPL) iPhone or iPad.

    "We want to make commerce easy and if we make it easy we can help our sellers grow and really give them time back to build their business and focus on what’s important to them," Dorsey tells Breakout in the attached video. "The merchant doesn’t have to think about which card brand is coming over the counter and if it’s cash or if it’s check, they just focus on their business and that’s what we want to enable them to do."

    That may sound like change enough, but the potential game-changing feature of the company is the data it provides to users.

    "What’s your most popular item, what happens on a Tuesday, what’s your most popular day, what happens when it rains? These are pieces of data that a lot of local businesses, a lot of neighborhood places just don’t have access to because it’s spread out over so many systems," Dorsey explains. "But Square makes it easy. You can literally watch in real time."

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  • By Joe Weisenthal

    Barring some last-minute miracle, it looks like the government is going to shut down at midnight tonight.

    The crux of the matter is that the House GOP is not inclined to pass a budget that doesn't include some kind of delay or defunding to Obamacare. And obviously Democrats won't agree to that. So, impasse.

    But there are reasons to think this would be good.

    Goldman explained why this could be helpful in a note to clients last Friday:

    It would be a mistake to interpret a shutdown as implying a greater risk of a debt limit crisis, in our view. It would not be surprising to see a more negative market reaction to a shutdown than would be warranted by the modest macroeconomic effect it would have. We suspect that many market participants would interpret a shutdown as implying a greater risk of problems in raising the debt limit. This is not unreasonable, but we would see it differently. If a shutdown is avoided, it is likely to be because congressional Republicans have opted to

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  • Washington is on the brink of a shutdown but the temporary closure of various government agencies would not impact the official enrollment date of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Millions of Americans without health insurance can choose a new plan starting Tuesday, Oct. 1, through the various state health marketplaces that were established by the law. Avik Roy, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, crunched the numbers and found that Colorado, New York and Ohio will offer the lowest insurance rates to residents.

    Related: Obamacare Could Mean Steep Rate Hikes in These Four States

    The savings will be big: rates will drop as much as 34% in Colorado, 30% in Ohio and 27% in New York. That may seem like a huge decrease, but Roy tells The Daily Ticker that New Yorkers, for example, currently pay some of the highest rates in the country, so “yes from a relative standpoint New York is going down but on an absolute basis New York will still be one of the highest cost

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  • I think there's a decent chance that the stock market will crash in the next year or two — maybe dropping 30% or more.

    Even without a crash, I think it's likely that stocks will deliver poor returns from today's level over the next 10 years. Not negative returns, mind you, but poor returns — average annual returns (including dividends) of only about 3% per year.

    Given that stocks are usually expected to return about 10% per year, that's pretty crappy.

    It's not crappy enough that I'm dumping my stocks. I expect bonds and cash to deliver lousy returns over the next 10 years, too — maybe even worse than stocks. And I'm scared we'll eventually get some rapid inflation, which stocks should provide some protection from (unlike bonds and cash). But I'm not expecting the double-digit gains we've had from stocks over the last few years to continue much longer.

    Why not?

    Two reasons:

    1) Stocks are expensive relative to earnings.

    2) Earnings are much higher than normal.

    Over the next 10 years, I expect

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