July 28th, 2011 by admin

Anyone needs knowledge and expertise to manage money and asset management refers to managing money for individuals through stocks, bonds and cash equivalents etc. In fact, the asset management system has sprung from maintenance management system which aims to optimize asset use.

Generally, the principles of asset management apply equally to all physical assets such as infrastructure, property, heritage, plant and equipment and asset management solutions can be utilized for that. Its strategy depends on financial aspects of ownership such as calculating the entire cost of ownership, depreciation, licensing, maintenance and insurance. Varying with the kind of an asset management strategy a firm or an individual can add value to his/her business.

By utilizing asset management solutions anyone can improve investment performance and manage financial risk exposure and also reduce costs to business. Now, keeping the incredible significance of asset management in mind, various asset management solution companies have mushroomed these days.

In fact, an asset management company is that firm which invests the pooled funds of retail investors in securities in line with the directed investment objectives. Various asset management services offer diversification, liquidity and professional management service. And that is why it holds a niche above the individual investors.

Moreover, an Asset Management Solutions company also provide advisory services for providing advices regarding mergers and acquisitions, asset management and restructuring to corporations, partnerships, institutions, governments and individuals. They also provide intelligence based asset management and logistics services for commercial and transportation equipments. And this is how they help to the corporate houses and individuals.

Hence, if you need to take care of your assets which have a cash value then choose an asset management solutions company and take a good care of them.

July 28th, 2011 by admin

As the economy continues to tank so do the number of Americans without health insurance-and the number small business owners who can afford to insure their employees.

A recent survey by the NFIB Research Foundation, a small business advocacy group, showed that only 47 percent of small business owners offer employee health benefits. Those employing 20 or more people are more than twice as likely to offer employee health benefits as those with fewer than 10.

The survey found that the low numbers are primarily the result of new small businesses opting not to cover employees. Most small businesses who offer benefits have offered them for a while and are reluctant to drop them for fear of losing good employees.

“It’s much better for employee morale if a small-business owner never offers health benefits, than it is to offer them and then be forced to take it away because it is too expensive to continue,” said William J. Dennis, NFIB’s senior research fellow. “Small-business owners experience considerable turmoil in their early years. They often experience cash flow problems and are reluctant to incur additional expenses such as health insurance. What’s new to this picture is that it appears that new small-business owners are waiting longer or choosing not to offer health insurance benefits to their employees at all.”

The fact that new small businesses are choosing not to offer benefits is a disturbing trend because of the swift turnover of the small business population. If the trend continues, the number of employers who never offer benefits will increase. And that will hurt small businesses because it will limit thet talent pool from which they draw.

What Can Be Done?

Small businesses aren’t alone in struggling with the cost of health care (and premiums) in the current economic climate. The U.S. Census Bureau reports 47 million people, or 15.8 percent of the U.S. population, were without health insurance during 2006

Unfortunately for the small business owner, new legislative approaches to help the uninsured may actually hurt them. One popular option is the “pay-or-play” mandate, in which employers are required to either provide health insurance for their employees or pay a penalty to offset costs the government incurs to provide health care for the uninsured. The rules likely would only apply to full-time employees.

Proponents say such mandates could significantly reduce the ranks of the uninsured, since the vast majority of the uninsured are in families with at least one full-time worker. Many of these are low-income families, suggesting that such measures could benefit the working poor.

Opponents argue that many low-wage workers will just be paid less, reduced to part-time or laid off to offset the insurance costs.

In their paper, “Employer Health Insurance Mandates and the Risk of Unemployment,” researchers Katherine Baicker and Helen Levy found several factors affect the extent to which such mandates cost more jobs:

? Cost of the insurance.

? How much of the cost of coverage will be passed on to workers via lower wages.

? How many uninsured workers have earnings so close to the minimum wage that their wages cannot be reduced enough to offset the cost of the new coverage.

The authors found that the mandate would still leave 54 percent of American workers without coverage.

“The vast majority of those who benefit from pay or play mandate live in families with incomes twice the poverty line or more and, depending on how coverage is determined, the mandate will leave a significant share of the working poor ineligible for such benefits either because their hourly wage rate is too high or they work for smaller exempt firms,” the authors wrote.

Most experts agree that such mandates are bad for small businesses. Employers are faced with hard choices. In the NFIB poll, only 20 percent of small employers said they would simply provide the insurance as required. Many more said they would either cut jobs or move more employees to part-time status.

Moving people to part-time work is a particularly attractive option to small business owners. In fact, how part-time employees are treated is a key influencing factor on whether small businesses support pay or play legislation.

According to NFIB, “The treatment of these employees will alter relative costs in one direction or the other, providing small employers’ strong relative incentive to change.”

Small business experts agree that if part-time employees are covered by a mandate, most employers will respond by simply eliminating jobs, adding to the jobless rate and doing nothing for the rate of uninsured.

Small business owners have always faced an uncertain future but the current economy and the health care crisis make this an extremely tough time to take the startup step.

July 28th, 2011 by admin

Keynesian exuberance for the powers of stimulating demand or the ‘consumer’ has been in vogue since the 1930s. It is sheer nonsense which is taught in every school across the globe. Keynesian economics is little more than intellectual pablum used by those in power or by a technocratic and largely illiterate elite to increase their power; enhance government; print money and otherwise destroy normal economic relationships. Keynes’ theory, so believed by professors is in practice a disaster.

Keynes was a left wing wall flower and a member of the deranged Bloomsbury group of inter-World War British pacifists. He was an arrogant theorist who truly believed in the magical elixir of large government and in the technocratic dream of controlling billions of personal, business and economic decisions, to programmatically construct a perfect world order. Keynes gave intellect and jargon filled cover and rationale to politicians and demagogues who would cite his book, ‘The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money’, to justify state interventionism.

According to this theory which has failed in practice every time it has been tried, governments can stimulate an economy through granting consumers, workers and businesses sums of borrowed money. This is termed a ‘stimulus’. This debt or current deficit financing stimulus, is then paid back or retired, when the economy strengthened by consumer spending and business investment, produces a surplus of tax revenues. The stimulus is needed, so argued Keynes, to overcome business cycles, downturns and unexpected events which would decrease jobs, increase unemployment and impact state revenues. By macro and micro-managing economic and production processes, the state, so thought Keynes, would avoid cyclical variations and ensure that the lowest level of unemployment could be maintained. Government power was thus indispensable to full employment and income equality.

There are many problems with such a counter-rational plan to economic management. None of Keynes’ core assumptions make sense when they are analysed either separately or together. Business cycles have historically been caused by governments, and they are usually a response to government policies to increase the size of the state through trade barriers, higher taxation, more spending, more regulation and programs of fear and compliance. The Great Depression, the 70s Stagflation and the current financial crisis are all obvious examples of this fact. Government causing economic malaise would appear to mean that government programs are not the solutions required to either get out of an economic downturn, nor to prevent future derailments from taking place.

The main impact of Keynesian economic stimuli is to increase debt; raise future tax rates and distort the normal functionings of economic markets and personal and corporate decision making. Governments choose winners and confirm losers. The winners will include companies which get bailed out, those receiving welfare, unions and others having their jobs protected, those receiving redistributed incomes and those paid off for political support. The losers invariably include firms both domestic and international who want fair and free trade; higher income families; small businesses who are classified under high income categories; future generations who must pay off the debt; and consumers who pay a higher costs for all products and services.

Under Keynesian philosophy, government and technocrats assume the role of God. Given the poverty of God heads throughout history, this is probably not a noble supposition to support.

Brian Reidl from Heritage Institute wrong an excellent article recently on the fallacy that government spending, or what is termed Keynesian deficit spending, run by God-heads, is beneficial (see Reidl

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.aspx?GUID=220a4261-b3c8-4338-a5be-62bcc3f3b8d3). In this article he makes the following important points about demand-side management and the Keynesian fetish for economic control.

“Government cannot create new purchasing power out of thin air. If Congress funds new spending with taxes, it is simply redistributing existing income. If Congress instead borrows the money from domestic investors, those investors will have that much less to invest or to spend in the private economy. If Congress borrows the money from foreigners, the balance of payments will adjust by equally reducing net exports, leaving GDP unchanged. Every dollar Congress spends must first come from somewhere else.

This does not mean that government spending has no economic impact at all. Government spending often alters the consumption of total demand, such as increasing consumption at the expense of investment.”

When stimulus packages are created the money has to come from someone via taxes, or be printed. Both are net negatives to the economy. Economic growth only results from producing more goods and services (not from redistributing existing income), and that requires productivity growth and growth in the labor supply as productivity not only increases wealth but also wages and wage opportunities.

Historically of course government spending has reduced productivity and long-term economic growth due to some obvious reasons. As government spends more it raises taxes which reduces profits, productivity and wage and job creation. As government incurs more debt through stimulus and demand side packages it reduces the incentive to produce and displaces money by removing the more productive private sector from the economic equation and replacing it with a far less effective state dollar, taxed or printed on government printing press. The inefficiency of government policy in health, housing, education, and general industry are obvious creating huge costs which must be borne by ordinary taxpayers – ineffective solutions at a higher price one can say.

And as Reidl sources and proves:

“Mountains of academic studies show how government expansions reduce economic growth:

1.Public Finance Review reported that “higher total government expenditure, no matter how financed, is associated with a lower growth rate of real per capita gross state product.”

2.The Quarterly Journal of Economics reported that “the ratio of real government consumption expenditure to real GDP had a negative association with growth and investment,” and “growth is inversely related to the share of government consumption in GDP, but insignificantly related to the share of public investment.”

3.A Journal of Macroeconomics study discovered that “the coefficient of the additive terms of the government-size variable indicates that a 1% increase in government size decreases the rate of economic growth by 0.143%.”

4.Public Choice reported that “a one percent increase in government spending as a percent of GDP (from, say, 30 to 31%) would raise the unemployment rate by approximately .36 of one percent (from, say, 8 to 8.36 percent).”

It is obvious that Keynesian economics and demand management are tools for fools. Wealth, a better society, a cleaner world, a higher level of development is not coerced by government. It only occurs when free people operating in free markets are allowed to interact and determine the price and supply of various goods and services. Government involvement ensures the opposite and is a theory mired in cultish theological absurdity.