As of July 1, Google Reader will no longer be available to the public. For those unfamiliar with Reader, it is a free, web-based RSS app used to organize and read blogs and news alerts. Reader is an essential tool for journalists, press secretaries, war room directors, researchers and anyone who consumes an above-average amount of media. Twitter’s CEO Dick Costello, who used to work for Google, described Reader as the ideal tool “for information junkies, not just tech nerds.” For those curious as to why Google would shut down Reader, Chris Wetherall, a co-founder of Reader, discusses the history of the Reader project and Google’s prioritization of their social network efforts in Google+.
Where should Google Reader loyalists turn? There are a variety of Reader competitors on the market, but none are as simple, clean and fast as the original. My recommendation is to wait. There are a few talented software companies, such as Betaworks (the team behind bit.ly and the new digg.com), eager to …
When Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) discussed his new proposal to break up the largest U.S. banks and place a cap on future growth in a recent interview with Mike Konzecal of Washington Post’s Wonkblog, he misrepresented accounting standards to justify his idea to cap bank size. And the fact is, his overall proposal does little in the way of reducing systemic risk while placing the U.S. financial sector and the American taxpayer at a permanent disadvantage in the global economy. Below are a key counters to his main points.
Point #1: Smaller banks cannot provide the same services as larger banks
Point: “I have yet to hear why 20 super-regional banks couldn’t do a better job than 11 megabanks that benefit from implicit guarantees from the federal government.”
Counterpoint: It’s a misconception that smaller, regional banks would provide this service in the absence of large U.S. banks. If they could, they probably would. The syndicated loan market is a perfect example: In 2012, Wal-Mart received the largest syndicated …
Actually, it’s the fourth – the first true stress test of the modern financial system was the financial crisis, and we all know how that turned out. As the housing bubble burst, many banks failed. In response, the federal government was forced to take drastic measures to support the economy, in hopes that things didn’t get worse. They did, for a while, but then they got better.
We’ve come a long way since.
But what if we experience another crisis of similar proportion? What if we are hit with the unexpected and unemployment goes to say, 12.1 percent, instead of the 10.2 percent peak of 2009? What if housing prices quickly declined 20 percent, instead of the 18 percent year-over-year decline of 2008? And, what if U.S. GDP and equity markets took drastic hits, while other international economies experienced downturns of their own?