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Cisco Systems Inc's announcement on Wednesday that it plans to lay off 5,500 employees is unlikely to be the last round of Silicon Valley pink slips as hardware companies struggle to keep up with rapid technology shifts, analysts and recruiters said. Companies that traditionally have made most of their money selling computers, chips, servers, routers and other equipment are especially vulnerable, analysts say, as mobile applications and cloud computing become increasingly important. The Cisco layoffs come in the wake of Intel's announcement in April that it was laying off 12,000 workers. Dell Incsaid in January it had shed 10,000 jobs...

Every summer from 2011 through 2014, with icy routine, when Cisco was closing out its fiscal year, it revealed mass job cuts. In July 2011: 6,500 layoffs. In July 2012: 1,300 layoffs. In August 2013: 4,000 layoffs. In August 2014: 6,000 layoffs. A veritable layoff machine. In the summer last year, with the new guy, Chuck Robbins, getting his feet on the ground, it skipped the layoffs. But the layoffs now being planned are a doozie. The aging Silicon Valley icon will lay off between 9,000 and 14,000 employees globally, “multiple sources close to the company” told CRN. If it...

1. The economy is merely “trudging along” at stall speed, so stocks are vulnerable This misperception is forgivable, given that U.S. GDP growth came in at around 1% for the first and second quarters. But to really understand the economy, you have to drill down on a lot more numbers than just GDP. And when you do so, the weak GDP numbers seem fishy. They just don’t jibe... * Employment growth is strong ... * Loan growth is robust... * Wage growth is solid. * Consumer spending is strong... The upshot? “Concern over the economy’s performance is running high, but...

Oil prices officially charged into a bull market Thursday as the prospect of an output freeze by major producers, data showing the first weekly fall in U.S. crude supplies in a month, and a decline in the dollar boosted prices. Crude-oil prices have advanced more than 20% from their Aug. 2 low over the past several sessions...September West Texas Intermediate crude CLU6, +0.23% climbed by $1.43, or 3.1%, to settle at $48.22 a barrel

January 27, 2014 | http://nypost.com/2014/01/27/obamacares-insurance-company-bailout/ “...John Q Public is about to get clobbered again, thanks to a taxpayer bailout of the insurers written into the ObamaCare law. Section 1342 of the Affordable Care Act forces taxpayers to make insurers whole for most of the losses they incur selling policies on the ObamaCare exchanges through 2016. The bailout is meant to hide the full failure of the president’s signature health law until after the next presidential election.” “... insurers who opt not to participate in the exchanges can’t get bailouts and don’t get subsidies for their customers, so you won’t have...

In the first six months of 2016, foreign central banks sold a net $192 billion of U.S. Treasury bills, notes, and bonds. This is more than double the pace from the same time last year. China, Japan, and Brazil were the leaders in selling U.S. debt. With the U.S. debt running at approximately $19.4 trillion, this could be problematic. A large selloff of U.S. bonds would decrease their price, or in other worlds, increase domestic interest rates in general (bond prices and interest rates always move in the opposite direction).

(Phys.org)—A team of researchers from Belgium and the U.S. has identified the active site of an iron-containing catalyst that has raised hopes for designing a practically useful catalyst that might make converting methane to methanol a possibility. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the researchers describe their efforts, what they discovered and why they believe their findings may lead to a practical way to convert methane to a more efficient energy resource. Jay Labinger, with the California Institute of Technology offers a News & Views piece outlining the work done by the team in the same journal issue....

TV personality Dr. David Andrew Pinsky said Wednesday that he is “gravely concerned” about Hillary Clinton’s health and the treatments she’s received, which he described as “1950-level care.” Appearing on KABC’s “McIntyre in the Morning,” Dr. Pinsky, a board-certified internist more commonly known as Dr. Drew, said he and another doctor reviewed Mrs. Clinton’s medical evaluations and came to some startling conclusions. “Based on the information that she has provided and her doctors have provided, we were gravely concerned not just about her health, but her health care,” he said in the interview, transcribed by the Washington Free Beacon. “Both...

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As the stock market reached its lunatic peak near 2200 in August, the certainty that the Fed is out of dry powder and that the so-called economic recovery is out of runway gave rise to one more desperate pulse of hopium. Namely, that the central banks of the world were about to embark on outright ‘helicopter money’, thereby jolting back to life domestic economies that are sliding into deflation and recession virtually everywhere—– from Japan to South Korea, China, Italy, France, England, Brazil, Canada and most places in-between. That latter area especially includes the United States. Despite Wall Street’s hoary...

The figures, among the first pieces of hard evidence on the economy’s performance after the U.K.’s decision to leave the European Union, suggest households largely shrugged off the surprise referendum result and kept spending. The British pound rose on the news, climbing 1% against the dollar to $1.3169 after the data exceeded expectations. The Office for National Statistics said Thursday that retail sales rose 1.4% on the month in July and were 5.9% higher than a year earlier. The official statistics agency said sales increased in all categories of stores it monitors, with sales at department stores and clothing outlets...

The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits fell more than expected last week, reinforcing views of labor market strength that could encourage the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates soon. Another report on Thursday showed a modest improvement in manufacturing activity in the mid-Atlantic region this month amid rising shipments from factories. But weak new orders and shrinking order books suggested the manufacturing malaise was far from over. Initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped 4,000 to a seasonally adjusted 262,000 for the week ended Aug. 13, the Labor Department said. Claims for the prior week were unrevised. Economists...

We are such an anxiety-ridden society that we worry about problems that haven't happened, and, almost certainly, won't. Robots are an apt example. Even McKinsey and Co., the high-powered management consulting firm, professes to be concerned. We imagine hordes of robots destroying jobs, leaving millions of middle-class families without work and income. Relax. Unless we adopt self-destructive policies, this is one doomsday we'll avoid. One thing that the U.S. economy excels at is creating jobs. You might doubt this listening to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, who promise personally to create millions of high-paying jobs. This is misleading. The overwhelming...

Josh Thomas, an American amateur brewer who was based in Hong Kong for five years, has tried what he described as an “absolutely insane amount” of Asian beers. He said that Taedonggang is “significantly better” than any other mass-market beer on the continent, chiefly because the best-selling beers of North Korea’s neighbors — Cass and Hite in South Korea, Snow and Tsingtao in China, and Asahi Super Dry and Kirin in Japan — are rice-based, light, and somewhat watered down. But since rice is so scarce in North Korea, brewers there tend to rely more on barley, which makes beer...

“I guess that experiment would have been tough on the ordinary Egyptian,” Hayden replied, without a hint of irony. As Tommy Lee Jones said in “Men in Black,” Gen. Hayden has no sense of humor that he’s aware of. He repeated the same point verbatim a few minutes later in his speech: It was a shame that the Muslim Brotherhood government of Egypt was overthrown, by acclaim of the majority of Egypt’s adult population, which had taken to the streets as the country careened towards ruin. Hayden, like Sen. John McCain, the Weekly Standard, and the majority of the Republican...

One of the most perplexing questions on the minds of young Americans today is whether college is worth the associated tuition cost. It is rather humbling to see that $1.4 trillion in student debt is outstanding today. That is more than auto debt and credit card debt. College tuition has outpaced virtually every category that is tracked in our inflation measures. It has out run housing prices. It has left healthcare in the dust. It has crushed wages which are stagnant for nearly a generation. The last item is probably the most important measure to examine. If college is worth...

Despite "heroic" promises to accept 160,000 Syrian refugees, European Union member states have only accepted 6,000 to date while the US alone has already admitted 8,000 of the 10,000 promised. So in light of recent terrorist attacks this begs the question is the U.S. being honorable or just dumb? According to Nayla Rush of the Center for Immigration Studies the answer might just be the latter (although she's far more polite than we are): excerpt at source Given the inability to properly vet refugees, even the New York Times has questioned Obama's logic after a number of refugees have been...

Target announced Wednesday that it will spend millions of dollars to add single-stall bathrooms in its stores, months after it caught heat for its transgender bathroom use policy. According to USA Today, about 1,400 of the retail giant's 1,800 stores already have single-stall restrooms that anyone can use. It will spent $20 million to add bathrooms to the 400 stores that do not have single-stall options. its restroom policy allows transgender customers to use the restroom that aligns with their gender identity. Critics blasted the decision, and the store reportedly lost $10 billion after that — although company officials denied...

For miles and miles Omaha stretches on, one tidy, suburban-style neighborhood after another filled with modern low-slung houses set on spacious lawns with towering oaks and elms. It's a model of comfortable mid-American living, with one unusual exception: thanks to a quirk in how Omaha developed, about 300 miles of streets in these nice neighborhoods are pitted with potholes almost big enough to swallow an SUV. The bad roads have been both an anomaly and a source of complaints for years. But recently, they've become the center of a mini-crisis after local officials began dispatching crews to tear up the...

Many companies are cutting jobs in response to rising health care costs spurred by the Affordable Care Act, according to a new survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Roughly one-fifth of service sector and manufacturing company executives said they are reducing the number of workers in response to provisions in the healthcare law... The New York fed surveyed about 100 executives in the manufacturing sector and roughly 150 executives in the services sector located in New York State, Northern New Jersey and Fairfield County, Connecticut... The results add to a bevy of bad news related to the...