LyrArc Article Gist
A study by BuzzFeed shows that all but three of 20 fake stories by hoax sites or hyper partisan elements with likes on Facebook spread fake news with stories on Trump or denigrating Hillary Clinton. During the last 3 months of the campaign in 2016 the fake stories or bogus news stories appearing online and on social media had a greater reach than authoritative reporting by mainstream news outlets, according to a study of Facebook activity by BuzzFeed. President Obama and chancellor Merkel took aim at the fake stories on social media and hate opinions in talking to the public in Berlin at their final meeting in November 2016. Obama said "because in an age when there is so much active misinformation and it is packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on television." He added it is a big problem that 43 percent of eligible voters do not vote and when "we are not serious about facts and what's true and what's not, particularly in age of social media when so many people are getting their information in sound bites and off their phones." Merkel compared the situation today with digitization to the social disruptions during the Industrial Revolution and gave her own warnings. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Joanna Stern of the WSJ uses the original iPhone that came out in 2007 for one day in June 2017 and sees how it felt to use the introductory version. The original one worked on a 2G cellular network. It took about a minute for the president's Twitter feed to fully load in the old phone's Safari browser, it now takes 5 seconds. A lot has changed with the smartphone revolution in ten years. Lunch spot search results, Stern points out, might take longer than the time to eat lunch in the Maps App with that old phone. No emojis, predictive text, no Siri, and no third party apps, no Apple Music or Spotify, all that came later. The 2 megapixel camera took decent shots but not without good light. What is useful in Joanna Stern's little experiment is that it makes one reflect on how quickly people forget, how so much is now taken for granted as smartphones change the way people live their lives and interact with technology on a daily basis. Not mentioned here is how common smartphones have become with the Android versions made in China offering so much more for the budgets of ordinary people. And how it has changed the lives of billions of people in China, India, other parts of Asia and Latin America, bringing them into contact with the outside world. What is also interesting in this sense is that what took a huge effort over many years and many disappointments- the idea of a touchscreen that works- shows what an idea and the courage to persist in the face of innumerable hurdles can accomplish. See the link to how  Steve Jobs accomplished this. Daisuke Wakabayashi talked with Apple engineer Greg Christie in his article-"Apple Engineer on iPhone's Birth," Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2014. Christie had worked on a digital personal assistant at Apple in 1996, one that had tried the first touch screen Apple made. The device failed in the market. In 2004, eight years later the touch screen is the idea Jobs had Christie work on again. Many frustrations and obstacles later the first smartphone was developed by 2007. It took 10 years and undaunted effort which is the Apple story under Jobs. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
U.S. president Obama is critical of the role played by the media in the 2016 election campaign in a keynote speech at a journalism dinner for the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting. Obama said lately " I spend a lot of time reflecting on how this system- how this crazy system of self-government works. How we can make it work. And this is as important to making it work as anything. People getting information they can trust and that has substance and truth and facts behind it." He added that "what we are seeing right now does corrode our democracy and our society. When our elected officials and political campaigns become entirely untethered to reason and facts and analysis, when it doesn't matter what is true or not, that makes it impossible for us to make decisions on behalf of future generations." On the way Donald Trump's campaign has lowered the level of public debate Obama had this to say- referring indirectly to the NYT report of over $1.9 billion of free television coverage given to Donald Trump by the media- the country, "would be better servedif billions of dollars in free media came with serious accountability, especially when the politicians issue unworkable plans or make promises they can't keep.. and there are reporters here who know they can't keep them." The wall between the U.S. and Mexico to be built with Mexico's financing, the deportation of millions of illegal immigrants, the 45% tariff on imports from China, reducing support for NATO, are some of the campaign themes used to appeal to disaffected voters by Mr. Trump in the election, which are some of the puzzling ways in which the election campaign for 2016 has evolved- without proper media scrutiny, and what some critics say panders to ratings at a time of shrinking television staffs and budgets. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Toyota plans to spend $1 billion on a marketing and advertising plan, spending that is 30-40% more than normal, to ramp up production and fill out inventory. It includes money to subsidize lease and loan rates, customer incentives and dealer ads. One aim is to raise the projected resale value of its vehicles used in calculating montly lease payments. Akio Toyoda is also giving more decisionmaking power to local executives for the markets they are more familiar with.

LyrArc Article Gist
Jeff Madrick asks what kind of Wall Street and banking industry would best serve the American people.

LyrArc Article Gist
Experts view Countrywide as being at the core of the problems at Bank of America, which has lost 60% of its share price in 2011.

LyrArc Article Gist
The US is facing a new pattern of demographic changes and their impact on Medicare and Social Security programs. The number of people on Medicare will grow in 2 decades, 2010- 2030, from 47 million to 80 million for Medicare, and from 44 million to 73 million for Social Security, according to this estimate. The workforce will grow more slowly and the tax base wiill shrink accordingly during this period. This pending worker-pensioner imbalance and the jump in the cost of the bill for Medicare and Medicaid, as well as the federal health benefit for poor people, create a major problem for the US. At the same time the group of people over 65 will rise in these 2 decades from 17% of the voting age population to 26%. This group and the people who expect to soon join this group will resist any changes to Medicare or Social Security programs, making it that much harder for the political process to tackle these issues to make the programs sustainable in the long run.

LyrArc Article Gist
Akio Toyoda and Yoshimi Inaba answer unrelenting questioning by a Congressional panel. Toyoda reafffirms the principles his grandfather stood for in building Toyota. A rare comment by former Toyota executive Jim Press throws light on the struggle going on inside Toyota betweeen the Toyoda family and career managers from the previous two CEO's. Jim Press said that the company was hijacked some years ago by anti family financially oriented pirates as he called the two previous CEO's Okuda and others working for them. And he added these managers lacked the character to preserve the company legacy.

LyrArc Article Gist
CreditSights, a New York research firm says about $33 billion in losses from home equity loans will hit the five largest banks in the latter part of 2010, an amount equal to what they expect in earnings for 2010. This would have an adverse effect on the banks and has the potential to stall the economic recovery.

LyrArc Article Gist
Issues about how many more jobs are supported by Apple beyond the 47,000 employees in the U.S. Estimates of job creation in China and overseas through supplier networks for iPads, iPhones and other products are as high as 700,000. Apple says it has "created or supported" 514,000 jobs in the U.S. Experts say it is hard to say how many jobs are supported. Of the jobs Apple counted in this number, the consulting group doing the estimate included 257,000 jobs at companies such as Corning that makes the glass for the iPhone, UPS, and a Samsung plant in Texas. The number was generated using a formula of the federal government's Bureau of Economic Analysis and how much money Apple spent on goods and services in the U.S. An additional 210,000 jobs were generated by companies making apps for Apple devices. The consulting company estimated that 45% of the 466,000 app related jobs in the U.S. -using the estimate of such jobs from TechNet- were for Apple apps. Apple released these figures on its website as criticism from the industry and outside mounts about whether Apple is doing enough for jobs in the U.S. Intel's Andy Grove is one of the industry executives who has pointed out that there is much scaling up at home that U.S. companies need to do....

LyrArc Article Gist
Only 61% of shareholders present at the annual general meeting voted in approval of the management at Deutsche Bank in May 2015. Legal settlements and lack of trust in strategies of management have hurt credibility. A large part of the lack of credibility comes from the culture at Deutsche Bank which is seen as slow to change. Co-CEO Jain was head of the investment bank when traders engaged in activities that are causing large legal settlements for wrongdoing. Strong criticism came at the annual meeting from shareholders. Han-Martin Buhlmann of the shareholder association VIP raised the question: "Mr. Jain, are you the solution to the problem or part of it?" Alison Esse, managing director of change consultancy, The Storytellers, says shareholders had voted no-confidence against senior management because they lack the credibility to restore the reputation of the bank.

LyrArc Article Gist
Using caution with bubble type internet stocks, stocks with no profits, real estate with large price jumps is suggested by experts. Models and methods have been developed to detect bubble type activity. Sornette at the Financial Crisis Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Bank of Finland's Taipalus have developed models to detect bubbles, including the bubble activity in internet IPO's and stocks in 2014. Chancellor at Boston asset manager GMO and Utkus at the Vanguard Center of Retirement Research have also come up with methods to detect bubble activity. Utkus says investors could reduce allocation by 10-20% in the case of stocks with bubble activity. Investors were doing this by reallocating in April 2014 from biotech and internet stocks to safer large cap stocks, because internet and biotech stocks had seen sharp increases of over 25% in a short period.

LyrArc Article Gist
Jesse Eisinger compares the public criticism and the response of two executives of major American banks- Dimon of JP Morgan Chase and Blankfein of Goldman Sachs. He says Dimon may come out looking better with his reputation in much better shape because of the changes he made at JP Morgan Chase after realizing that he had made faulty judgements. Dimon has now set the goal of putting JP Morgan ahead of the other banks in its risk management and working with regulators. Blankfein is seen as making only minor changes in the culture at Goldman and having overcome a wave of public criticism without significant change in the way the company does business. In the process Dimon will have learned more from the financial crisis and make improvements that will be good for JP Morgan in the future, an opportunity that Blankfein is seen as missing.

LyrArc Article Gist
Some straight talk from Bethany McLean on why Congress which repealed Glass-Steagall and refused to regulate derivatives. She says the Fed and the SEC which did nothing while all the excesses and risky behaviour were playing out on Wall Street should also join Goldman on the hot seat. The Office of Thrift Supervision and the Comptroller of the Currency, she points out actually used their power not to protect but to prevent predatory lending laws. And the ratings agencies signed off with AA ratings for a lot of junk. McLean tells readers Goldman's idea that what is good for Goldman is good for America is downright scary. She is a former Goldman employee who reminds readers that Goldman's 14 principles had integrity right up on the list, something Tourre and other higherups at Goldman simply lost sight of.

LyrArc Article Gist
The sense that is growing in the House that the healthcare bill has made compromise after compromise ending up with abill that is good for insurance companes and the pharmaceutical industry. Mr Obama's opposing the bill permitting importation of drugs to help Americans is on more evidence to these members of Congress and the Senate of being sold out by Obama.

LyrArc Article Gist
As Obama faces the situation FDR faced, between political popularity after election in 1932, and loss of some political capital in the first year by 1933, and a lot depends on political will and courage. He has to execute and implement plans for efficient government spending that builds jobs to replace those lost, and to use the investments in really productive ways including projects that provide returns for years into the future. As David Axelrod points out in the Frank Rich column in the NYT, people sometimes live in a parallel universe, which may be completely at odds with what the rest of the country caught in the economic currents of layoffs and collapsing businesses is thinking.

LyrArc Article Gist
Goggle's Eric Schmidt speaks at the annual meeting of the Newspaper Association of America on the issues raised by Google News use of newspaper content. He says it is unlikely that Google would buy the content behind a pay wall for a subscription and make it available to users for free. Under the current arrangement only AP is paid for content. Newspapers can choose not to be part of the Google Search but choose to get traffic from Google Search to their websites, and from Google News to their websites, which they monetize through advertising. Schmidt provided as one solution publishers creating more personalized news products that could be effectively delivered on the Web, on mobile phones and on the iPad.