Finance Industry News

There are two main threats currently facing the Chinese economy, and to the chagrin of the country’s policymakers, the yuan is caught squarely in the middle.

China’s central bankers have long been accused of pursuing a policy deliberately aimed at weakening the yuan to help ensure the competitiveness of China’s exports in the global marketplace. Indeed, it was China’s ability to manufacture and market goods at cheaper rates than most other exporting nations that helped make China the world’s leading exporter.

One unintended side effect of this growth however, has been a rapid increase in domestic consumerism. This is t

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What do you think of the iPad?
No other product has even come close to the buzz that iPad generated. We were talking about it amongst friends, family and colleagues; at dinner, home and twitter too.

Yet, many of us are spending our time wondering why anyone on earth will pay for this, while others are scratching their head with its name choice. Still, there are a select few who are very excited about this announcement. These people, who are making millions with the iPhone, told me about some of the apps that they are thinking of developing. I will list 10 of these, which should help get your own creative juices flowing.

1.

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Oil producers’ cartel Opec has told the BBC that compliance with production targets fell to 50-56% last month compared with 80% a year ago.

Secretary General Abdalla Salem El-Badri told the BBC’s Business Daily programme the move was “worrying”.

“The risk is you see a lot of oil in the market and no one is buying it. Then the price will come down.”

At its last meeting in Angola, Opec decided not to change the amount of oil being produced by its members.

Oil prices have doubled from their lows of December 2008, but are way down on the record $147 a barrel reached in July 2008. US light, s

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My RSS Feed is a cluster$#%@ of about 50 different sites and blogs that I follow. Yes, I am dying a slow death from information overload. But I just can’t close the door on my feeds!

Instead of patting the backs of my fellow personal financiers, I thought it would be fun to venture out a bit and list my five favorite procrastination stations… err, blogs, that I follow. I t

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My December post about Intuit’s decision to “end of life” Quicken Online and several recent press interviews have stirred up quite a bit of interest from the Quicken community about what’s next.  Since your feedback drives our product development, I thought I would say thanks to all of you who wrote in, and address a few pressing concerns.

•   Quicken Online End-of-Life – The Quicken Online “end of life” does not have any impact on Quicken Desktop products.  Quicken Online users will be migrated seamlessly over to Mint.com, preserving all of their account history and account connections.  On Mint.com, they’ll be able to track their investments, avoid more bank fees, and find more savings opportunities with a completely free product – while maintaining aspects from Quicken Online (like manual transaction entry).

•    Unified Platform – Instead of having three platforms – Quicken PC, Quicken Mac, and Mint.com – that are largely incompatible and have disparate feature sets, longer term (and a big caveat is this could be years away), I’d like to move personal finance to a unified platform.

Are you a long time Quicken PC user who wants to move to Mac? No problem, we have you covered (actu

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In order to encourage donations to Haiti, the U.S. Government recently announced that you are able to deduct taxes on cash donations to a list of approved IRS charitable organizations for the 2009 tax calendar year in addition to the 2010 tax calendar year (you usually can only deduct in the year that you donate).

IRS Haiti Donation Tax Law

Here are the details on deducting donations to Haiti:

• Only cash contributions made to these charities after Jan. 11, 2010, and before March 1, 2010, are eligible.

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