Free Republic

The demise of Silicon Valley Bank will spread ripples throughout America’s economy.Silicon Valley Bank’s main focus was funding technology startups, according to CNBC. Although the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. insures up to $250,000 per client deposit, CNBC said the FDIC’s protection has limited impact because most of its customers were businesses.As of December, about 95 percent of the deposits at Silicon Valley Bank were not insured, Securities and Exchange filings said.That’s bad news for companies like the TV streaming company Roku, which had $487 million in Silicon Valley Bank, most of which is not insured, according to The New York...

In China’s bid to acquire advanced technology from the United States, officials from the north-central city of Baoding tried to meet with Silicon Valley executives and discuss deals for companies to set up offices there, according to internal government documents that The Epoch Times obtained recently. Citing the Chinese regime’s key strategy of “bringing technologies in, exporting our products out,” the Baoding government detailed a successful example: it attracted AXT Inc., a U.S.-based designer and manufacturer of semiconductor substrates, to set up a factory in Dingxing county, Baoding. The semiconductor substrates are components for making electronic chips, which power nearly...

The son-in-law, Dr. The son-in-law, Dr. Howard Krein, is part of the firm StartUp Health. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's son-in-law is advising the Biden campaign on its coronavirus response while his venture capital firm is looking to invest in health-care startups working on the pandemic. The Biden relative, Dr. Howard Krein, is part of the investment firm StartUp Health, which in March, when the virus began its rapid spread in the U.S., began an initiative soliciting pitches from entrepreneurs with products that address the outbreak, according to Politico. The next month, Krein reportedly participated in daily calls to brief...

Appearing on CNBC Wednesday, Canadian businessman and television personality Kevin O’Leary raved about the state of the U.S. economy , based on his more than 50 “Shark Tank” companies. “Most of the Sharks have a similar portfolio,” O’Leary told CNBC on Wednesday. “It’s an amazing index on America’s economy because they’re almost in every state, in every sector.” O’Leary along with investors Mark Cuban, Robert Herjavec, Barbara Corcoran, Lori Greiner and Daymond John put up their own money on “Shark Tank” to buy stakes in start-ups looking for capital and influential business partners. “I can report to you, on a...

On April 10, 2018, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz grilled Facebook Chairman and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg over the social media platform’s content moderation policies. Citing examples of Facebook censoring pro-conservative accounts and articles, Sen. Cruz explained to Zuckerberg, “to a great many Americans, that appears to be a pervasive pattern of political bias.” Sen. Ted Cruz then pressed the Facebook chairman on whether his organization was a “neutral public forum,” arguing that neutrality is necessary to enjoy the protections guaranteed by Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. A willingness to consider modifying Section 230 to weaken protections enjoyed by...

I came to Kyiv from Italy to visit some friends living here last summer. My intention was to spend a few days in the city, and then go on a long trip back to Rome, through Eastern Europe, via trains and buses. During those two weeks, I never left a two-mile radius in the old city. While Rome and Italy felt stale, stuck in their ways, overly touristic, dying on the vine, and emotionally unstable, Kyiv showed signs of hope, strength and newness—like a strong flower poking through the hard dirt. There was a feeling of optimism in the youth—passionate...

“LIKE Florence in the Renaissance.” That is a common description of what it is like to live in Silicon Valley. America’s technology capital has an outsize influence on the world’s economy, stockmarkets and culture. This small portion of land running from San Jose to San Francisco is home to three of the world’s five most valuable companies. Giants such as Apple, Facebook, Google and Netflix all claim Silicon Valley as their birthplace and home, as do trailblazers such as Airbnb, Tesla and Uber. The Bay Area has the 19th-largest economy in the world, ranking above Switzerland and Saudi Arabia. The...

French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire says it's "unacceptable" that Google and Apple unilaterally impose prices and other contractual terms on software developers, and that this is hurting France's startups. Le Maire predicted the tech giants could face sanctions amounting to millions of euros, according to AFP. It’s not the first time the French government clashes with Google. It has repeatedly criticised the company for paying little tax in France by transferring its revenues to a subsidiary in Ireland, where taxes are much lower. Wednesday's move comes amid growing fears of an international trade war pitting the United States against...

With the finances of disgraced Fyre Festival concert promoter Billy McFarland being questioned, major investors in the concert-turned-fiasco are facing unexpected scrutiny and potential liability for the money lost. Unpaid vendors, employees and attendees of the Bahamas concert that was canceled before it began have filed 11 civil lawsuits, which include six class actions and five private suits, and all will be seeking damages.... ...McFarland was arrested in New York on June 30 and released on $300,000 bail the next day. The 25-year-old entrepreneur was represented by a public defender at the bail hearing, but has since retained Boies Schiller...

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s signature economic development program may have created fewer jobs than the state says. The Democratic governor’s administration released a report on Start-UP NY that says the program has generated 408 jobs since its 2013 launch. But a close look at the database accompanying the report puts the number at 395, and a lawmaker says other discrepancies suggest dozens of jobs may have been double-counted. …

After 15-plus years in business, predominantly with industry leaders in the UK and Sweden, I recently ventured into the world of Berlin startups — the land of flat hierarchies, table football, internships and copycat business models. I expected a vibrant, exciting startup scene that mirrored the incredible city I chose to move to from Stockholm. Were the rumors true? Is Berlin Europe’s startup capital? A veteran German businessman told me in my first week that “some companies here aren’t even real companies” — I wasn’t even sure what that meant! But I quickly learned that the thriving “Silicon Allee” scene...

Despite the hype surrounding tech "unicorns" — the myriad of startups that are valued at over $1 billion — the number of entrepreneurial endeavors in the US has actually been declining for some time now. According to researchers, not only are there now fewer startups being created in the US, but the slowing rate of entrepreneurship is hurting the economy. "Historically, the U.S. has exhibited a high pace of entrepreneurship with a small share of fast growing young firms disproportionately accounting for job creation and productivity growth," said the new study. "The decline in startups and the accompanying decline in...

The number of private tech companies valued at $1 billion or more has surged so much this year that on average 1.3 so-called unicorn companies have been created every week in 2015, according to data from CB Insights. But now it looks like winter is coming to Silicon Valley. Fortune's Dan Primack went to San Francisco this week and met with a number of people involved with unicorn companies with ballooning valuations. He says the mentality of people in Silicon Valley is starting to change, and people are getting scared. "As in the past, they are nearly unanimous in sentiment,"...

Ditch Brooklyn, millennials. The real place to be is Des Moines, a city with a blossoming culture scene, thriving start-ups, and urban beauty.(VIDEO-AT-LINK) DES MOINES, Iowa—This is too nice a place to spawn a war cry. But if the city had one, it would be the sentiment heard across a downtown populated by baristas, tech start-up founders, musicians, and nonprofit professionals alike: "It's Des Moines against the world." Young people here know what you think of this city. It doesn't need repeating. But ambitious minds are in the process of building a new Des Moines, a tech hub in Silicon...

It wasn't long ago that cloud storage companies such as Box and Dropbox were among the hottest startups in Silicon Valley, blessed with vast amounts of venture capital and poised to go public in blockbuster IPOs. But now, thanks to a price war launched by Google, Amazon and other tech giants, almost anyone with a laptop or tablet can get cloud storage for less than the price of a latte. That means Box and Dropbox, which sell software for businesses and consumers to store and use files on the Internet rather than a machine, are confronting a precarious future: They...

Back in the early 1948, two enterprising Californians formed a small company in one of their garages -ala Steve Jobs- then began to manufacture a powerful slingshot of Ash wood. The weapon was of their own design, demonstrated enthusiastically by the pair, and was utilized by shooting clubs for practice/some kinds of hunting, even for firing meat up to trained falcons in flight... Richard Knerr and Arthur 'Spud' Melin were bored with their jobs upon graduation from USC, so they brewed-up the idea of the slingshot, which was a mild success and set their taste for marketing alight. Legend goes that the 'Wham-O' name was taken from the sound...

I TYPED these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen. And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook — invented, among others, by the college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by the degreeless Sean Parker. American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians....

NOTE: Jackson is the CEO of CapLinked, an online platform for private investing. He previously ran the marketing team at PayPal, and is the author of the award-winning book The PayPal Wars. President Obama announced a new tax proposal that sets a minimum tax rate for households with annual income above $1 million on Sept. 19. The proposal is called the “Buffett Rule” for billionaire investor Warren Buffet, who in an editorial in August bemoaned that he pays a lower federal tax rate than his middle-class employees. While time will tell if this new tax proposal makes for good politics,...

Nevertheless, as the Republicans faded into irrelevancy, the free market was at work. Even before Obama and the Democrats could get their first environmental bill on the table, the USA was changing. The current regime’s environmental plans are irrelevant. They will be passed into law, but they are irrelevant nevertheless. America has opened its eyes. America has awakened. America will lead.

I ran across this sort -but-interesting article today-written by JIM VERDONIK , a securities lawyer in Raleigh, NC, who does a great deal of new business startup work. There is a lot of "gloom and doom" about business,but his conclusions may surprise - and encourage you. (Excerpt ommitted for copyright reasons)