Fortune Watch

Emphasize tradition and heritage in your advertising campaigns and don’t cut prices, said marketing guru, Martin Lindstrom, as he revealed his top 10 tips for the advertising during the economic downturn.

Brands that invest in marketing during a recession tend to gain market share as their competitors lose focus on their overall strategy, he said. Lindstrom was speaking in the run-up to his Buyology Symposium, held recently at Dubai. The symposium – the first time it was held in the Gulf – will cover the impact of subliminal advertising and the revolutionary influence of neuroscience in marketing.

The book, Buyology, which was released in October, is the result of a groundbreaking study on NeuroMarketing, which studied thousands of volunteers and was the largest of its kind ever taken.
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If you serach for online casinos at the moment there are thousands of casinos around at the moment, both online and land based.  But can it be done? If you search or visit the best online casino can you find a source of betting systems that don’t require you to pay $100’s up-front with no proof that they work? Can any betting system work at a casino? This site offers listings of top rated online casinos including those that accept US players and features a forum.

With the right system, and most importantly, the right discipline, it can be done. Casinos typically work to a ‘House Edge’ of 1 to 5%. For every $100 gambled, the player will lose $1 to $5. It doesn’t sound like much, but in a multi-billion dollar industry it’s enough to make online casinos some of the most profitable sites in the world, and to build Las Vegas up from nothing in just a few years.

A whole lot of people will tell you that it is impossible to overturn this edge, and from a purely mathematical point of view they are correct. The Laws of Probability mean that you cannot turn a negative into a positive. If you are playing Roulette, and Black has come up 10 times in a row, the odds of it coming up next time are still 50/50. (Ignoring the ‘0’ and ’00’) According to the Laws of Probability, there is no reason why Black cannot come up 100 times in a row. This argument, while scientifically sound, ignores the Law of Possibility, which means that in the real world, the chances of Black coming up 100 times in a row is so slight that it can be ignored.
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Warren Buffet a highly influential American has finally hit the panic button, saying that we are going to be crushed under a mountain of debt taking into consideration the amount of debt the country is piling up.

Last year, Warren Buffett says, we were justified in using any means necessary to stave off another Great Depression. Now that the economy is beginning to recover, however, we need to curtail our out-of-control spending, or we’ll destroy the value of the dollar and many Americans’ life savings.

Here are some not-so-fun facts from Buffett’s editorial today in the New York Times:

* Congress is now spending 185% of what it takes in
* Our deficit is a post WWII record of 13% of GDP
* Our debt is growing by 1% a month
* We are borrowing $1.8 trillion a year

$1.8 trillion, that’s a lot of money. Even if the Chinese lend us $400 billion a year and Americans save a remarkable $500 billion and lend it to the government, we’ll still need another $900 billion.

Which brings us to the million Dollar question “where’s it going to come from?” Most likely the printing press. And, ultimately, that will destroy the value of the dollar.

A  Miami man, Albert Gonzalez, 28, his motto is “operation get rich or die trying”. Two Russians and Albert Gonzalez are being indicted for allegedly stealing 130 million credit card numbers, the largest identity theft in history. That’s a lot of credit card numbers — like, one for every housing unit in the United States. Just how did they do it?

The historic theft involved five corporate data hackings, between 2006 and 2008, including Heartland, Hannaford, 7-Eleven and two unnamed companies, according to Channel Web. US investigators say the team scanned lists of Fortune 500 companies and learned about their checkout counter machines (also known as point-of-sale systems).

Then they would write specific codes to corrupt their data systems and launch a virus from computers in the United States and Europe to pull hundreds and thousands of credit card numbers, and sort through them using a “sniffer,” which is basically a data analysis system that decodes big chunks of information.
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September is fewer than three weeks away. Feeling nervous? Maybe you should be. For investors, the period between Labor Day and Halloween is proving an annual fright show. And no one knows why.

It was, of course, in September last year that Lehman collapsed and everything fell apart. But then it was also September-October 2002 that the last bear market plunged to its lows.

The 1998 financial crisis? It began late August, and rolled on for two months.

The famous crash of 1987 came in October. But most people have forgotten that the market actually started sliding downhill in late August.

That’s almost exactly what happened in 1929 too. The big crash came in October, but the market peaked just after Labor Day. Prices began falling through September, then tumbled further still.

The worst month of the Depression? September, 1931, when the Dow fell about 30 percent. It was also in September, 2000, that the bear market really got going.

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Source- Graphjam

Would you marry a bachelor with a million dollars? My friends used to raise the same question when we were kids. What usually sparked a debate was the ensuing query: What if that man or woman is ugly and cruel? Obviously, we were totally clueless about romance and marriage back then.

Now, friends still raise the issue from time to time, but discussions have taken a different twist. “Would you marry for love or money?” They now ask.

I just found a report that attempts to answer the million-dollar question. According to “Marriage for love of money” at Wall Street Journal, two-thirds of women and half the men said they would marry for money.

When asked about their “price” to see them walk down the aisle, the singles said it would have to be over $1 million to $2 million in net worth.

But isn’t love the end-all and be-all of happiness? Doesn’t almost every chick-flick end with a blushing bride marrying the “man with a good heart” and they live happily ever after? Not necessarily. It’s the marriage that comes in bundles of money that lasts.

That’s at least according to Daniela Drake, a former McKinsey consultant, who recently raised the issue in her piece in Reuters. Are women better off marrying for money?

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A phenomenon that had had been declining is making a comeback. The seedy dangerous world of the loan shark is experiencing a new surge of popularity as progressively greater numbers of people are refused credit by the major and sub-prime lenders.

‘Loan sharks’ is the term used to describe money lenders who operate illegally. These lenders are not licensed by the financial services and so are completely unregulated. The Office of Fail Trading (OFT) issues guidelines to first and second line lenders. These guidelines must be adhered to or the lender will lose its licence. They concern a raft of items, however they specifically lay down a set of rules that are designed to protect the interests, livelihood and privacy of the borrower; for instance licensed lenders are prohibited from using unethical tactics to pursue debt arrears and are not permitted to charge unethical interest rates.

On the other hand the loan sharks operate with a completely free rein. Examples of this are interest rates and repayment terms. Loan sharks will often charge enormous rates of interest and offer loans on extremely bad terms for the borrower. Should the borrower fail to make scheduled repayments on the loan, the loan shark will often use extremely unethical tactics in order to get their money back. Often they will make further loans in order to enable the borrower to repay the first one. Gradually the borrower will become entrapped in a debt mountain with which they are unable to cope.

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The mantra of the times is cost cutting. The axe of cost cutting invariably falls on the employees. It is either through wage reduction, reduced bonuses, reduction of other benefits, reduced work hours or in a worst case scenario in the form job losses.

In most countries unemployment rates are hitting close to double digits, the worst case scenario might soon become a reality for anybody including you. In such a situation, it is imperative that you should have a plan B ready.

Instead of waiting for a surprise and acting re actively, it is important for you do a realistic assessment of your current situation.

Each and every one of you must have an understanding of your employer’s financial situation and strategy, your own function/department current state and whether there is any danger of retrenchment at your level. Once you access the macro and micro level picture, you need to play your next steps accordingly.

You may not have a choice but to look out for alternate employment if you feel that you may be in the firing line. It may not be easy in the current situation. However the current economic situation gives you an excellent opportunity to do what you always wanted to do.

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His girlfriend’s house was surrounded by Federal agents in black SUV’s this afternoon, they told him to walk out and introduce himself. So he did, and he asked them, ‘If you’ve got a warrant, take me into custody. If you don’t, I’m going to Houston.’ And they did, so they arrested him.

Chairman of the troubled Stanford Financial Group, R. Allen Stanford surrendered to FBI agents in Virginia Thursday afternoon, his attorney said. Law enforcement officials said Stanford is in custody after surrendering in Stafford, Va. Authorities plan to unseal an indictment charging Stanford on Friday, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case.

Stanford Financial Group has been under investigation by a grand jury in Houston. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil charges earlier this year accusing Stanford and his top executives of conducting an $8 billion fraud by advising clients to buy certificates of deposit from the Antigua-based Stanford International Bank.

The SEC’s lawsuit charged that the bank advertised its CDs in a brochure touting a conservative investment philosophy. But instead the bank’s portfolio was “misappropriated by Defendant Allen Stanford and used by him to acquire private equity investments and real estate,” the suit says.
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