globalEDGE Blog - Page 148

Many financial institutions are turning to social media as a way to attract and engage their customers. The Managing Director for TD Ameritrade, Nicole Sherrod, even works on the weekends to send tweets and interact with the firm's clients. She believes that as a result of her presence on social media, she now has "an even closer relationship with clients" and has been able to get to know them better. By posting on the weekends, she is able to show her activities after work hours and build a more personal relationship with the consumers. Twitter in particular is a useful tool to help financial service workers to navigate company guidance and industry regulations to share industry news, respond to questions from clients, and address other problems or concerns.

With small entrepreneurial business growing, it is important to know the resources that are out there to help grow your business. The U.S. Small Business Administration provides many different ideas to help expand your small business successfully, whether it is to a neighboring state or country, or to the other side of the world. Some of the suggestions include the use of technology, forecasting, building your own franchise, and developing a marketing plan. In the rest of this post, we will look a little deeper into how you can plan for successful growth for your business.

This year, economists expect that Brazil’s economy will shrink by 1% in real terms and by as much as 15% in dollars due to maxed out credit cards, rising inflation, and government increases on prices for fuel, electricity, and transportation. In the last year, consumer spending has stagnated and could even decline by 3% in 2015. However, the Brazilian e-commerce industry seems to be excelling despite all of these indicators. Price savings and the convenience of online shopping caused Brazilians to spend $30 billion online last year, which marks an increase of 9% since 2013.

As the old adage goes “the only way to go is up after rock bottom,” Greece seems unable to stop pushing its economic limits. Despite its previous bailout programs designed jointly by the IMF, ECB, and European Commission, relief arrived coupled with harsh measures. Austerity packages were the fine print for Greece’s lending agreement; yet, unemployment has checked in at 25% this year, while most of the bailout money went toward settling international debt rather than jump-starting the economy. It is perhaps this ineffective past experience that has left Greece resentful toward the idea of another double-edged bailout measure, which is why Greece is currently celebrating its new-found and likely brief freedom from dependence on external problem solvers.

Global discussion and concern about climate change has amplified in the past few years, as more research has been conducted and more world leaders have voiced their opinions on the issue. The most recent world leader to do so was Pope Francis, leader of almost 70 million Catholics worldwide, who declared global warming to be a threat to life on the planet and called for a reduction of the usage of fossil fuels. As this movement garners further support, more and more nations are turning to clean and renewable alternative energy sources to supplement, and eventually replace, their fossil fuel driven energy sources. Of these renewable alternatives, solar power is one of the most popular worldwide.

With a new development by an engineer at Michigan State University, soon a sky scraper could generate enough energy from its windows to supply all of the energy it needs. Researcher Richard Lunt, of Michigan State University, has been able to do what many have tried in the past, making a fully transparent solar concentrator. This new technology, within the next couple of years, could change the face of solar energy and global business. This new technique could change the windows in any building or the glass face on a mobile device into a solar power harvesting application. 

Tonight at some point before 8:00 PM Eastern Time, the world will experience what is known as a "leap second". There will be a minute of time that is 61 seconds long. Today, June 30, will be approximately one second longer than usual, and official atomic timekeeping will factor in this second before turning over to July 1. This strange concept has a fascinating history and explanation; however, it is also a cause of concern for market traders around the world, who fear that this extra second will disrupt global operations.

From the free silver policy issue of the 1800s to the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, America has always had differing views on how the dollar should be valued and leveraged, as well its role in the global currency exchange. Ever since the eve of World War II, the U.S. dollar has had notable domination in the international marketplace. In nearly all transactions made using more than one currency in the past three years, the dollar was required as a conversion factor to complete trades. The U.S. dollar, for quite some time now, has been the world’s reserve currency. In Currencies After the Crash, Sara Eisen explores the impact of the world’s strongest currencies, the possible ramifications of highly leveraged monies, and the perilous yet profitable realm that is the foreign exchange market.

In her novel The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, author and Georgetown University professor of international economics Pietra Rivoli researches and follows the lifespan of a simple commodity - a t-shirt - across the world, while examining the insights it provides into the markets, power, and politics of an increasingly interconnected global economy. Beginning with a street peddler selling shirts intended for tourists in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Rivoli investigates the roots and destinations of her t-shirt in an epic that spans the U.S. cotton industry's historical versatility and dominance of international markets, textile production facilities in China, market demands for affordable commodities in the United States and Europe, and ending its journey in used clothing markets in sub-Saharan Africa.

In the past few years, globalization has become more apparent in its role in the global economy, where more people, countries, and economies are becoming interconnected with one other. In the book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman attempts to break down the role that globalization has played and how it can be considered as a new sort of international system for the future.