Category: Business

  • National Debt (Strangely) Unchanged for 70 Days

    The U.S. national debt for the past 70 days has been stuck at exactly $16,699,396,000,000, CNSNews.com reports, citing the Daily Treasury Statement for July 26.“That is approximately $25 million below the legal limit of $16,699,421,095,673.60 that Congress has imposed on the debt,” the report notes.Fed debt subject to the legal limits imposed by Congress first…

  • More Bankruptcy Coming (to a city near you)

    The top 10 biggest U.S. cities on the brink of pension bankruptcy. #1 Philadelphia – Unfunded liability of $9 billion, $16,696 per household, only 1 year before the pension accounts are empty #2 Chicago – Unfunded liability of $44.8 billion, $41.966 per household, money runs out in 4 years #3 Boston – Unfunded liability of…

  • Da Mare’s Private Road to McCormick Place

    A $43 million busway built to whisk conventioneers between downtown hotels and McCormick Place has turned into “the mayor’s road” and should be opened to taxicabs in exchange for a surcharge, Ald. Robert Fioretti, 2nd said Monday. Fioretti suggested turning the 2.5-mile busway into a money-maker after Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg lifted the veil…

  • Lockheed Martin’s Desalination Graphene Filters

    Lockheed has developed a special material that doesn’t need as much energy to drag water through the filter. Graphene is a substance made of pure carbon. Carbon atoms are arranged in a regular hexagonal or honeycomb pattern in a one-atom thick sheet. This special material is a film of a special structure of carbon, a…

  • China Economy to Overtake U.S. by 2016

    China’s economy expanded last year at 7.8pc – its slowest pace in more than a decade – and recent data has fuelled concerns that any rebound in the country’s growth is losing steam. However, the OECD was upbeat, predicting in a new survey of China’s prospects that the country’s economy could expand by 8.5pc this…

  • Sugary Drinks Kill 25k per Year in the U.S. Alone

    Consumption of soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages may contribute to hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world, mainly due to Type 2 diabetes, a new study says. The results show sugar-sweetened beverage consumption is linked to 180,000 deaths a year worldwide, including 25,000 deaths a year in the United States, the researchers say. via…

  • Moody’s Downgrades Chicago’s Motor Fuel Debt

    Moody’s Investors Service has downgraded to A3 from Aa3 the rating on the City of Chicago’s (IL) $181 million of outstanding rated motor fuel tax debt. The outlook has been revised to negative. via Moody’s. Surprises no one.  Barely qualifies as news actually. The City’s broke.  Unemployment (real unemployment, the U6 number) is out of…

  • SEC Hits Illinois with Securities Fraud Charges

    Illinois broke federal securities laws in misstating the true health of the state’s depleted pension funds when going out onto the bond market between 2005 and early 2009, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced Monday.  … The finding of securities fraud doesn’t subject the state to any fines or penalties but amounts to a warning…

  • FREEDOM License Plate Banned in D.C.

    According to the official list of banned D.C. plate combinations, it may take some extra creativity to get your idea accepted by the city’s meticulous censors. The capital city’s DMV has a 53-page list of 26,993 license plate no-no’s that prohibit everything from praising the local baseball team to expressing disgust with the Internal Revenue…

  • Druckenmiller: Old Stealing From Young

    Druckenmiller, who is known to be media shy, told Bloomberg TV that he sees “a storm coming, maybe bigger than the storm we had in 2008, 2010” and it has to do with a demographic bubble. “But the demographic storm is just starting now. It reminds me of ’05 when people just extrapolated housing prices…