General Finance News

It is no secret that the recession took its toll on retailers, and Guess Inc. (NYSE: GES) was no exception. For the past three quarters the apparel retailer has posted lower year over year earnings, but the company broke the trend today posting third quarter earnings that were higher than the same period last year.

The stock is trading sharply higher in after hours trading after the company posted 69 cents per share, which was in-line with analyst estimates. While the 69 cents was not able to beat out analyst estimates, it did mark a 2 penny increase over the 67 cents that it reported for the same period last year, and marked a record for third quarter earnings for the company.
What really caught the market’s attention was a better than expected fourth quarter forecast. Read more…

Australian banking major Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) broke its silence Monday and issued an announcement confirming that the lender does not have a large enough exposure to incur a material loss from a possible default by troubled sovereign holding company Dubai World.

CBA released a terse one sentence statement saying:

“Commonwealth Bank of Australia confirms that it does have a financial exposure to Dubai World but it does not expect to incur a material loss as a result of the recently announced debt moratorium,”

CBA made its announcement on Monday, after maintaining silence on Friday, even after its three other Big Four rivals all confirmed that their exposure to the sovereign holding company of the Dubai government would not generate any material losses for them.

Dubai world wants a six month moratorium on its debt repayments. The

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The dental and health group plan is becoming more and more popular as the years pass. Group plans offer people the most freedom of any other dental and health insurance plan available. Are you wondering how these plans work? 

A group plan is a dental plan that incorporates a large variety of quality dentists for you to choose from. This is the main reason why most people choose this type of plan. Choosing a dentist can be just as hard as choosing the dentist plan itself. This is why these group plans offer such a wide variety of dentists for you to choose from. Another great feature of group dental and health plans is the affordable price they come at.

Group dental plans are great for families as well.

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Australian banking major Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has refused to comment on whether the lender has any exposure to troubled sovereign holding company Dubai World.

The AAP sought comment from CBA on whether the lender had any exposure to either Dubai World or Dubai Commercial Operations Group LLC. In its response a CBA spokesperson said: “It is not appropriate for the Commonwealth Bank to discuss confidential client information”.

The spokesperson refused to make any further comment.

CBA’s deafening silence follows a statement from rival ANZ which said that the lender had no material exposure to Dubai World.

“We work with a number of well established relationships throughout the Middle East but we do not believe there will be any material adverse impacts to these relationships as a result of the moratorium announced by Dubai World,” an ANZ spokesman said.

NAB and Westpac have yet to comment on their exposure to the troubled sovereign holding company.

Global credit ratings agency Fitch downgraded two Dubai government related companies on Friday.

On Friday the ratings agency downgraded the long term credit ratings of the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority, and Dubai Holding Commercial Operations Group from A minus to triple B minus. The ratin

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With more than $23 trillion pumped into the financial system via monetary and fiscal policy in the last 12 months, there’s good reason to fear a rise in inflation, particularly if the U.S. Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing is not withdrawn in time.

Further, rising inflation accompanied by competition for capital from abroad would invariably lead to rising interest rates in the United States, but so far, higher interest rates have not manifested themselves. One example: The U.S. Treasury this week sold $44 billion in two-year notes for 0.802%, Bloomberg News reported. In other words it borrowed $44 billion for less than 1% — an astoundingly low rate.
What’s behind the low rate? There remains a great deal of demand from institutional investors (IIs) for safe investments, and U.S. Read more…

Over the last few months, I’ve given a small pile of presentations related to The Simple Dollar, my upcoming book, and other topics. Along the way, I’ve learned several things about what constitutes a good presentation and what constitutes a failure. Here are the seven key things I’ve learned, which you can take away to make your own presentations better.

1. Lots of words on the screen is bad. If you have a lot of words on the screen, people stop paying attention to what you’re saying and start reading the words on the screen. I suppose this is fine if you don’t want people to pay any attention to you at all, but that’s usually the opposite of the effect you want.

I had this problem with my early presentations, where I loaded down slides with words. As I spoke and looked out over the crowd, I could see a large number of them quite obviously tuning me out and reading the words on the screen. Then, when

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Global insurance giant AXA SA, the largest insurer in France, says it hopes that ”one day” it will complete a takeover of AXA Asia Pacific Holdings (APH) as it seeks to increase the footprint and market share of its life insurance business across eight emerging markets.

”We hope to be in the position to complete one day or the other. We want to change gear by increasing our footprint in emerging markets.” Chief Executive Officer Henri de Castries told investors in Paris.

If AXA SA’s bid for APH is to be successful, it needs to win the support of Melbourne based APH’s independent board members, which would seal Asia’s biggest takeover this year.

APH has so far rejected the $11 billion unsolicited joint bid launched by AXA SA and Australian wealth manager AMP. The bid inclu

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Monica writes in:

I used to buy my daughter several new outfits before the start of the school year and then a few more items for Christmas. This worked well when she was less picky about her clothes. The last few years, though, she’s wanted nothing but a few specific brands of clothing – and those brands are expensive. I want her to have plenty of clothes to wear during the school year, but I don’t want to go broke during the process. What do you suggest?

I actually went through this myself when I was a teenager, but instead of wanting trendy clothes, I mostly just wanted high-end basketball shoes. I was usually quite content just wearing a tee shirt and whatever jeans were available, but the one thing I always desired were pairs of Reebok Pumps or Nike Air Jordans.

Now that the roles are reversed, I find myself looking ahead to my own children’s teenage years as well as looking back at how my parents handled such situations on a small budget. Here ar

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