Blog Posts by Stacy Curtin

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The U.S. economy grew slightly better than expected in the second quarter, up 1.5 percent versus estimates of 1.4 percent, according to the Commerce Department. An increase in personal consumption helped drive the better than expected figure.

The last quarter was the weakest period of economic growth since the first quarter of 2011. The Commerce Department also reported that growth in the first three months of this year was revised up to 2 percent from 1.9 percent.

U.S. markets rose after the GDP report on hopes that the Federal Reserve will announce another round of quantitative easing at its two-day meeting next week.

While GDP has been used for decades as a barometer for economic growth and progress, "when you look closer at what is happening in our society, it is clear that GDP growth has failed to deliver," wrote Lew Daly of the liberal think tank Demos earlier this year. "For example, while GDP roughly doubled between 1980 and 2007, the

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Amazon (AMZN), which has come under intense scrutiny for unfavorable labor conditions at its fulfillment centers, announced a new worker-education program this week to help improve the careers of some of the company's most dedicated employees.

The largest U.S. online retailer plans to reimburse its full-time hourly workers for vocational training at an accredited school. Selected employees would be given $2,000 a year for four years.

The caveat lies in the program requirements. In order to apply and participate, workers must have been with the company for at least three consecutive years.

Amazon posted details about its program on its retail site Monday:

"At Amazon, we like to pioneer, we like to invent, and we're not willing to do things the normal way if we can figure out a better way. It can be difficult in this economy to have the flexibility and financial resources to teach yourself new skills. So, for people who've been with us as little as

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The 'too big to fail banks' have lost the support of arguably their most fervent backer.

Former Citigroup chairman and chief executive officer Sandy Weill shocked the world Wednesday when he said "mistakes were made" and it is time to break up the same banks he helped create.

"What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking, have banks be deposit takers, have banks make commercial loans and real estate loans, have banks do something that's not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that's not too big to fail," Weill said on CNBC.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Weill is essentially proposing to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act nearly 13 years after it was repealed -- an event Weill himself played an integral role.

"What I am suggesting that they be broken up so that the taxpayer will never be at risk so that the depositors won't be at risk, the leverage of the banks will be something reasonable, and the

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Mitt Romney heads to London this week as part of a larger European tour, which will also take him to Israel and Poland.

While in London, the former Massachusetts Governor is scheduled to attend two campaign fundraisers for U.S. expats hosted by bankers and lobbyists embroiled in the LIBOR-gate scandal.

London-based Barclays paid a $450 million fine earlier this month for manipulating LIBOR — the rate used to determine the price of roughly $800 trillion worth of financial instruments.

Ex-Barclays CEO Robert Diamond resigned July 3 on news of the scandal. He soon dropped out as a Romney fundraiser co-host, even removing his name from the invitations.

But Barclays' lobbyist Patrick Durkin remains co-chair of Romney's fundraisers. The DC-based lobbyist has already raised more than $1 million for Romney's White House bid.

According to the Washington Post, Romney's London fundraisers will include a reception and a dinner. It costs $2,500 per person to

Nearly three in ten Americans have no money saved for a financial emergency, according to a recent survey by Bankrate.com. Twenty percent of people polled said they have less than three months salary saved up for an unexpected financial crisis. That leaves only 42 percent of Americans financially prepared for the proverbial rainy day.

While it seems like common sense to have money saved for a financial crisis, the biggest issue holding people back from saving more is that the majority of Americans live "pay check to pay check," says budgeting expert Steven Smith, adding that the recession and bleak jobs market has exacerbated the problem.

Smith is also the CEO of Mvelopes, a free online budgeting tool, and joins The Daily Ticker in the accompanying interview to offer his advice on how to be better prepared for emergency situations.

The ideal size for an emergency savings fund varies widely. But Smith suggests people have at least three months of

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Global markets continue their decline Monday morning on worries over the ongoing European debt crisis. The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended last Friday's session down 121 points.

Fears about Spain needing a full-scale sovereign debt bailout have increased in the past week. The yield on the benchmark Spanish 10-Year bond hit a Euro-era high of 7.5% on the news. Meanwhile, the Bank of Spain announced its economy shrunk 0.4 percent in the second quarter.

As for Greece, European leaders are gathering in Athens Tuesday to discuss the country's latest rescue package, which could now be in jeopardy. The Prime Minister of Greece, Antonis Samaras, warned over the weekend that his country is facing a "Great Depression" and Germany's Der Spiegel magazine reported that the IMF may stop aid to Greece, sparking more fears of a Greek default.

As part of Greece's bailout, Greek leaders agreed to cut spending to 120 percent of GDP by 2020. But it does not look

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Lay's potato chips is calling on all Americans to help create its next chip flavor in celebration of its 75^th anniversary next year.

And there's more.

The creator of the winning chip will win a whopping $1 million dollars or 1% of the chip's 2013 net sales (whichever turns out to be more) from PepsiCo's Frito-Lay division. The two runners up will win $50,000 in prize money.

To kick-start the "Do Us a Flavor" contest, Lay's built its first-ever Lay's brand flavor popup store in the middle of New York's Time Square. The Daily Ticker was on site to interview the chief marketing officer of Frito-Lay North America, Anindita Mukherjee, about the $13 billion brand's largest marketing campaign to date.

"Today consumers want to have their voices heard," she said. "They want to have their hand in where a brand goes, what a flavor is for a brand, what direction it goes, they want to have a say."

Lay's, the world's largest food brand, is also teaming up with

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America is headed for a fiscal cliff if members of Congress fail to act before the end of the year.

Many economists agree that if no action is taken, 2013 will begin with a $600 billion drag on the economy, or a 4 to 5 percent hit to GDP, due to a combination of tax hikes and budget cuts set to take effect. To put that in perspective, the knock to economic growth could be twice as much as current GDP growth forecasts for all of 2012 and more than any annual GDP growth in the last decade.

Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin said this week at the CNBC Institutional Investor Delivering Alpha conference that the impact of the fiscal cliff could be worse than the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, which resulted in the worst recession since the Great Depression.

A new report by the American Action Forum forecasts between 2.8 million and 10 million jobs could be lost as a result of falling off the cliff based on a set of GDP economic multipliers