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    • CFTC Holds Twitter #HackCrash Hearing

      It was one week ago this Tuesday that a hacked AP account tweeted, “Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured” to its 1.9 million followers.

      Moments later, the @AP twitter handle released a statement saying they had been hacked and that President Obama was fine, but the markets had already reacted. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 150 points and lost $136 billion in value before rebounding.

      The Syrian Electronic Army, a group that backs Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and attacks western media for what they believe to be unfair coverage of the country's ongoing conflict, has taken responsibility for the hack.

      The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission is investigating the Twitter hoax and held a panel discussion Tuesday on “market issues resulting from the April 23 twitter attack.”

      The CFTC’s technology committee is made up of bankers, scholars, and traders who, according to The New York Times, are looking at 28 different futures contracts

      Read More »from CFTC Holds Twitter #HackCrash Hearing
    • One of the big problems in the U.S. economy right now is that big corporations are generating record profits not by growing revenues but by cutting costs.

      "Costs," as everyone who works for a big corporation knows, are a synonym for employees, employee wages, employee perks, capital investment, and research and development.

      As a result, we have reached a point where corporate profit margins are at all-time highs and corporate wages are at all-time lows as a percent of the economy. (See charts here.)

      That's not sustainable, says economist Gary Shilling of A. Gary Shilling & Co.

      The employees whose collective wages are stagnant or dropping account for most of the spending that drives the economy. So if employees aren't getting paid well, and corporations aren't spending, the economy can't grow quickly.

      Shilling observes that, from a philosophical perspective, what is happening is that "capital" (the owners of corporations) are dominating "labor" (the rank and file employees who make and

      Read More »from Gary Shilling: Henry Blodget Is a Marxist!
    • Stocks are starting the week near all-time highs despite an earnings season that has been filled with revenue misses.

      “The reality is that investors are only enamored with what the Fed and other central banks are doing. They’re shoveling money out the door,” says Gary Shilling, president of A. Shilling & Co., an economic consulting firm. Investors, in turn, have adopted a “don’t fight the Fed," attitude Shilling tells The Daily Ticker.

      What that approach is missing, says Shilling, is an understanding of what the economies in the U.S. and overseas are doing, which isn’t much.

      The U.S economy grew at a 2.5% in the first quarter-- well below expectations of 3.2% growth though much better than the 0.4% reported for the fourth quarter. “Europe is in recession, Japan is barely growing and China is slowing,” says Shilling.

      Related: Long-Term Bear Sees One Economic Bright Spot: Jobs

      This gap—what Shilling calls the “great disconnect”--between a strong stock market and a weak global economy

      Read More »from Gary Shilling: The Disconnect Between Weak Economies and Strong Markets Won’t Continue
    • Few Americans were aware of the dangers of industrial farming and processed food before Michael Pollan published his best-selling books “In Defense of Food” and the “Omnivore’s Dilemma.”

      A hero to the locavore and organic movements, Pollan has never shied away from expressing his opinions on what to eat, where to eat and the proper way to raise and harvest what we eat.

      In his new book “Cooked," Pollan urges more Americans to home-cook their meals. Cooking, he says, will lower obesity rates and re-connect individuals with “the material world.”

      Related: Michael Pollan: Home Cooking Will Solve America's Obesity Epidemic

      Eating the right foods are as important as eating foods that are not genetically modified, Pollan argues in the accompanying clip. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are “plants or animals created through the gene splicing techniques of biotechnology, or genetic engineering,” according to The Non-GMO Project, a nonprofit organization that tests food products for GMOs.

      Read More »from Michael Pollan: Genetically Modified Foods Offer Consumers “Nothing”

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