| Fidelity Investments Estimates $215000 Needed to Cover Retiree ...
Retirees' Future Social Security Benefits Business Editors MULTIMEDIA AVAILABLE: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=5364904 BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 27, 2007--A 65-year-old couple retiring in 2007 will need approximately $215,000(1) to cover medical costs in retirement(2), according to Fidelity Investments' latest health care cost estimate, released today. This figure is a 7.5 percent increase over the 2006 estimate of $200,000. The retiree health care cost estimate is calculated annually by Fidelity Investments. Since the estimate first was computed in 2002, the number has risen a total of 34 percent, with an average annual increase of 6.1 percent. The 2007 estimate assumes individuals do not have employer-sponsored retiree health care coverage and includes expenses associated with Medicare Part B and D premiums(3) (32%), Medicare cost-sharing provisions -- co-payments, co-insurance, deductibles and excluded benefits (35%) -- and prescription drug out-of-pocket costs (33%).
Senate Should Put Stem Cell Research Money Where It Will Do Good ...
WASHINGTON, April 9 /Christian Newswire/ -- Fr. Frank Pavone, National Director of Priests for Life, issued a statement today on the upcoming U.S. Senate vote this week on the public funding of embryonic stem cell research. "All of the successful advancements in stem cell research have come from using stem cells whose derivation did not require the destruction of lives," said Fr. Pavone. "A vote for S. 5 is not only a vote for killing human beings in the name of research; it's a vote for wasting money. Congress should invest the funds in research that will do moral and practical good." Priests for Life is the nation's largest Catholic pro-life organization dedicated to ending abortion and euthanasia. For more information, visit www.priestsforlife.org.
In a Shift, Pose Proxy Questions
Mutual-fund companies are proposing big investment-policy changes this year, with many asking shareholders for permission to put more of their money into foreign stocks and real estate just as those once-hot investments are slowing down. Mutual funds don't always have such issues, but this year is producing a barrage of proxy-voting ballots in shareholders' mailboxes from fund companies that haven't made such changes in a long time. Shareholders are also being bombarded with phone calls encouraging them to vote. Some common fund proposals requiring shareholder approval include voting on trustee changes, investment advisory agreements and changing certain investment policies. "This ... .
What Web 2.0 Means to Securities Firms
According to the reports author, Matthew Nelson, senior analyst at Tower Group, securities firms are starting to use Web 2.0 tools such as mashups, blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds and data search services. Merrill Lynch is rolling out Salesforce.coms Wealth Management platform to its 25,000 retail advisors, the report found, and integrating it with Thomson Financials Thomson One workstation. Although neither application is intrinsically Web 2.0, the way the two applications interplay with each other and with the mini applications Salesforce.com makes available at its AppExchange site, is a Web 2.0 mashup in Nelsons view. The term mashup came from the deejay world, where you take two pieces of music and you combine them in a new, innovative way and come up with something entirely new, Nelson says.
The jewel in Barclays' crown
A week ago, few people would have heard of Bob Diamond: now, the Barclays president is well on his way to being a household name, featuring on the Today programme and the Six O'Clock News, as well as being splashed across every British tabloid. To his chagrin, however, the headlines were not because of his success in expanding his business - Barclays Capital, the part of the bank which he runs, has grown by an average of 25 per cent a year for the past decade, almost twice as fast as the so-called 'bulge bracket' investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs. Nor were they because of the key role he is playing in persuading Dutch group ABN Amro to agree a merger with the British bank. .
Discover spinoff details disclosed
Morgan Stanley on Friday disclosed some of the first details on how it plans to sever ties between the investment bank and its Discover credit card business through a tax-free spinoff.
The filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission said Morgan Stanley won't have any stake in Riverwoods-based Discover Financial Services, the nation's fourth-biggest credit card brand, after the transaction is done. The documents didn't specify how many shares each Morgan Stanley stockholder will receive or when the spinoff will be completed.
Morgan Stanley had announced in December that it would spin off Discover sometime in the next year. The move comes as rival Visa International plans to go public this year, following in the footsteps of MasterCard Inc., which went public last year.
The clanking of coins may well teach valuable lessons
Standing in front of about a dozen children, I started to panic. The lesson plan said to introduce myself, explain what I do for a living and share stories from my youth about saving. The first two were easy, but the third had me stumped. Clanking the coins inside my silver metal duck bank always made me feel rich as a child. Opening it up and counting the change was a favorite pastime. But every time I took money out, less would go back in. I'd always pocket some of the change to buy candy or a toy. I didn't want to tell kindergartners, first-graders and second-graders that, but it was the only thing I could remember about handling money as a child. But if my duck bank had looked different, I would have had a better story to tell.
NYSE zeroing in on Asian markets
PROMISING Chinese and Indian companies have long been accustomed to foreign investment bankers knocking on their doors, but over the past two years they have started to receive another type of visitor - overseas stock exchanges wanting to host their initial public offerings. .
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