Normal Play Money

Coffee talk with the newest Starbucks board Member

Clara Shih is one of the Starbucks board members. In the puropose of both youth and social media know-how they showed it. As a 29 year old CEO of Hearsay Social, and they had a few conversations with Shih.
Fortune: Why are you joining the Starbucks board?
Shih: I've been a huge fan of Starbucks for a long time and when they approached me I was thrilled not only because it's such an admired brand, but also because of how much it has invested in social media. I said yes because two years ago we started Hearsay Social to establish a new era of enterprise software around what we believed was a new business imperative, and this board appointment is a validation of that dream.
That sort of sounds like you're hoping this board seat will be a PR boon for Hearsay. Accurate?
No, that's not why I'm doing it. I just mean that this is my first public board appointment, and it is a validation of the importance of the type of work Hearsay is doing. There may or may not be PR benefits to Hearsay, but they weren't part of my decision-making process.
Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg plans to step down from the Starbucks board next year. Do you view yourself as the designated "social media" replacement?
I'm a huge fan of Sheryl's personally and worked with her in the past at Google (GOOG), but I don't see myself as her replacement.
Start-up CEOs aren't known for having much free time. Did you have any concerns that the board seat would become a time burden?
It is something I've thought a lot about. I've gotten better over time at saying 'no' to things, but when this opportunity came up I knew it was one I couldn't turn down. Not since starting Hearsay Social have I felt this excited about an opportunity.
Are you interested in taking other public board seats?
It's hard to say in a general sense, except that I do think there need to be more women and young people on public boards.
Any worries that Hearsay Social might now have trouble getting business from a Starbucks competitor?
It hasn't really crossed my mind. Obviously I'll have to recuse myself on any Starbucks board business that involves Hearsay Social, and I assume any other world-class organization would respect that separation.
Do you get some sort of special card now that gives you free coffee?
Not that anyone's told me about yet.

From these we can learn that Shih can handle her job very well, and succeed as a great CEO, if she manages it well.  It is really interesting, and looking forward to the future outcomes.

Occupy Economics

Economics

Concerns about the impact of growing economic inequality fit neatly into a larger critique of mainstream economic theory and its deep faith in the efficiency of markets.
Willingness to use the C-word (capitalism) often signals concerns about a concentration of economic power that unfairly limits individual choices, undermines political democracy, generates financial and ecological crises and limits access to alternative economic ideas.

At the final plenary session of the conference, titled “Ethics and Economics,” participants discussed an “Economists’ Statement” in support of Occupy Wall Street that has been posted online at Econ4, a new site aimed at popular economics education. As of Nov. 27, the statement had gotten more than 220 signatures.
Populist anger — whether from the left or from the right — typically challenges conventional wisdom. In a startling opinion piece recently published in The Wall Street Journal, Sarah Palin urges the Occupy protesters to realize that Washington politicians have been “Occupying Wall Street” long before anyone pitched a tent in Zuccotti Park.
So how can we solve throughout the economic crisis? 
GDP equality could be one of the solutions to the concerns.

Italy's Labor Pains

Italy, what's happened to all of its defending champions?

If you want to know which of Italy’s many problems is the most daunting, look no further than the first sentence of its constitution, written in 1947, which describes the country as “a democratic republic, founded on labor.” That foundation has begun to crumble. Italy’s economy can no longer afford the generous benefits it showered on its workers in the 1960s, when the country grew 5 percent to 6 percent a year.
How serious is the labor issue? The laws are so unclear that many dismissals of workers end up in the country’s dysfunctional court system, where if a judge decides a worker was let go unfairly, he will likely rule that the employer has to reinstate him with back pay for the time he was gone.
Italian work contracts are negotiated nationally. Union leaders and employer federations set pay scales, benefits packages, and employment conditions for entire classes of workers—metal mechanics, textile laborers, construction workers, journalists, even maids and nannies. Workers—especially public employees—are guaranteed the same wage wherever they live.
The result is crippling. The World Economic Forum ranks Italy 123rd out of 142 countries in the efficiency of its labor market. Employers are robbed of their ability to innovate, from experimenting with hours of operations to introducing new forms of wage structures.
Another way for a worker or small entrepreneur to avoid becoming entangled in red tape is to opt out of the formal economy altogether. Anywhere from 15 percent to 27 percent of economic activity is underground, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the International Monetary Fund.

As long as Europe and the U.S. held a technological edge over the developing world, Italian companies could afford some inefficiencies. Globalization now means a worker in Warsaw or Shenzhen is just as likely to be sitting at a modern workstation as his counterpart in Detroit or Torino. If Italy wants its workers to be paid more than those in emerging markets, it can’t afford a frozen labor market.
Newly appointed Prime Minister Mario Monti must reform a country where free-market ideas don’t have a political base. There is one way to build public support for change. Italy supports a class of workers who, though universally despised, are the most pampered in the country. That is the bad part about Italy, and they should get their attention straight on ITALY.
So from my suggestion maybe  Italy should make their new point of equilibrium and adjust their economic crisis to their new point , and arrange it.

Getting to Elasticity

Elasticity

 1.) Elasticity

What is an Elasticity in Economic Definitions?

Elasticity is the measure of responsiveness. It will measure how much something changes when there is a change in one of the factors that determines it. 

3 Elasticities of demand to consider: 

price elasticity of demand [PED]

cross Elasticity od Demand[XED]

income elasticity of demand[YED]

How Does it Work?

The price elasticity of demand is a measure of how much the quantity demanded of a product changes when there is a change in the price of the product. 

In the PED there are two extreme values, when the PED is equal to zero and when the value is infinity.

When the PED equals to zero, then a change in the price of a product will have no effect on the quantity demanded at all, and when it is infinity it is a perfectly elastic in price. 

Also there are inelastic demand and elastic demand, the inelastic demand is less than one and greater than zero, and the elastic demand is greater than one and less than infinity. Also there is the unit elastic demand when it is equal to one. 

In the PED there are determinants: the number and closeness of substitutes/ the necessity of the product and how widely the product is defined/ and the time period considered. 

2.) Example

So there is a company that produces pillows, and lowers the price of the pillows from $5 to $4.50 and finds that the weekly quantity demanded of the pillows increases from 1000 to 1500. 

The PED= 5%

The total Revenue rises by: $1750

So if the total revenue decreases the interests of the population will decrease.

The 1 Bank Fee that Fell Flat

Still in Crisis? 

From the following weeks there has been a huge amount of dept,mainly from the Bank of America. However, no t only the Bank of America surrendered from the dept, other several Banks surrendered from the dept.

So What Do We Do Now?

You can evade the monthly checking free in several ways: bank where your mortgage is, use direct deposit, or meet balance minimums in deposit or investment accounts. But since interest rates on savings average 0.2%, it doesn't make sense to put thousands of dollars in the bank just to save 10 bucks a month.

Also get your savings from your savings in the new year. And try credit unions or online banks: They're busily marketing services they can offer gratis thanks to lower overhead.

From this article I felt that the economic crisis is not over yet, and these economic crisis will depend on the amount of price and quantity supply and demand it affects the social media and the whole world. In order to find the new solution I think we should find the new equilibrium point of the economic point and solve the way out from the depths.  

Supply and Demand and the Stock Market

Stock Market Alert!

What is a Stock?

"The law of supply and demand is more important than all the analyst opinions on Wall Street." 

-William J. O'Neil-

Stock, what is a stock?, it is a partial ownership of a business or company. Companies typically start their business as a private venture. So when are the stocks used in companies? When companies are in need to raise money for their benefit, they often sell part of their business for to the public. With the buyers and sellers in the market buyers come and ask for a specific price and a specific number of shares so that they can have nice circulating cycle of stocking with other companies. However, not all the shares that the company is allowed to issue are sold. So these shares are called the public float. And the shares in treasury are not traded and do not affect the supply and demand for a company's stock. But the company reserves the right to sell some or all of these shares in the future through another public offering. In some companies these business' are called thinly traded. They may go days without any transactions taking place. Also called as illiquid. Others are heavily traded. Major corporations fall into this category and the reason is that the companies usually can not opt to buy or sell "at the market," meaning they have to accurate about the stock trading rules. To conclude in the definition of stocking in the are of economics in the real world, supply and demand are felt in the stock market in a very real bidding war by buyers and sellers negotiating transactions. So the key to success is to understand the flow of economics.
The Economics of the Stock Market
Basically, the image of the stock is determined by the ability the company has to bring for their benefits. However, the process of bringing forth benefit to one's company is very difficult and it has different and changed opinions that change the stock prices and allow companies to consider buy or selling their products. These process have same laws in demand and supply. Therefore, if the supply goes up (shifts to the right), the value of the stock will fall, all other things being equal. If the supply drops, the price goes up. On the other hand, when the stocks become more attractive to investors the demand increases, and when the investors lose interest, the demand falls and so do the prices.
There are some factors in that affect the supply and demand for stocks:

Supply

1. If a new share offering is conducted to raise additional capital, this increases the supply of shares on the market.
2. If employee stock options are granted, this has the potential to increase the supply of shares when the options are exercised.
3. If a company has a stock split, this increases the supply of shares on the market.
4. If a company buys back its shares and cancels them (called a normal course issuer bid), the supply of shares decreases.
5. If a major shareholder liquidates a major portion of his or her personal shares, this has the effect of increasing the supply of shares on the market, though strictly speaking, these shares were already part of the public float.

Demand

1. Demand for a stock is affected by a number of factors:If profits reported are greater than expected, demand increases.
2. If profits reported are less than expected, demand decreases.
3. If the company is not profitable, expectations of profit are what drives demand.
4. Sales are also drivers of demand. Important new contracts will send demand up while shortfalls in sales will send demand down.
5. The company’s debt load can affect demand. If the company takes on too much debt, demand could fall if the public believes the debt to be unmanageable.
6. News about a company can change the demand for its shares. Good news increases demand. Bad news lowers demand. 
7. Mass psychology can play a huge role in demand. Individual stocks as well as whole markets can move quickly if there is a general belief among investors that the stock or the market will go up or down even if there is no rational basis for such movement. Extreme movements to the upside are called bubbles. Extreme movements to the downside are called panic selling.
8. Mass psychology is characterized by the concepts of fear and greed. These can be augmented by real life events unrelated to the market. 

An interesting fact is that every change in price and volume represent shifts in supply and demand and the setting of new equilibrium levels. Through these new equilibrium levels it tells the companies the great deals about the make-up of the mass of buyers and sellers in a particular stock market. But why do they change? it is because the buyers and sellers themselves are also a factor in a mix. 

Zynga's Stock "Scandal"

ZYNGA  and CityVille

In the journal called "The Wall Street Journal," Zynga pasted the front-page as his story. A social gaming company called the farm-ville are giving up their previous-granted stock. In this article Zynga states that he does not want to harm the WSJ, but just clarify the misunderstood  conclusion from the wall street journal. So the main problem Zynga had to deal with was the stock option grants given to early Zynga employees. There were no promise as to what the shares may ultimately be worth, but start-up employees were optimistic bunch that often left higher-salaried jobs with more established companies. Once an employee's options vest, he or she is generally entitled to keep them whether or not they remain employees. However, in Zynga they like to do it in a different way. rather than firing under performing employees and handing unvested options to the replacement Zynga likes to find other positions that the employees would be pleased with and remove their position. At Zynga it seems that Pincus intents on retaining talent, even if that talent either didn't live up to initial expectations or didn't adequately match up to the changing needs of a fast-growing company. Zynga is a company that organizes by its' product groups, and such products have easily measured metrics. However, as a final point, Zynga could be accepted as a moral business. This kind of buisiness depands on the technology , or the population of the  shifting supply in the curve.